Non-destructive vacuum-assisted measurement of lung elastic modulus.

Autor: Chen J; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, United States., Mir M; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, United States., Pinezich MR; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States., O'Neill JD; Department of Cell Biology, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, United States., Guenthart BA; Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States., Bacchetta M; Department of Thoracic Surgery, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States., Vunjak-Novakovic G; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States., Huang SXL; Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, TX, United States., Kim J; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, United States. Electronic address: jkim6@stevens.edu.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Acta biomaterialia [Acta Biomater] 2021 Sep 01; Vol. 131, pp. 370-380. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Jun 27.
DOI: 10.1016/j.actbio.2021.06.037
Abstrakt: In living tissues, mechanical stiffness and biological function are intrinsically linked. Alterations in the stiffness of tissues can induce pathological interactions that affect cellular activity and tissue function. Underlying connections between tissue stiffness and disease highlights the importance of accurate quantitative characterizations of soft tissue mechanics, which can improve our understanding of disease and inform therapeutic development. In particular, accurate measurement of lung mechanical properties has been especially challenging due to the anatomical and mechanobiological complexities of the lung. Discrepancies between measured mechanical properties of dissected lung tissue samples and intact lung tissues in vivo has limited the ability to accurately characterize integral lung mechanics. Here, we report a non-destructive vacuum-assisted method to evaluate mechanical properties of soft biomaterials, including intact tissues and hydrogels. Using this approach, we measured elastic moduli of rat lung tissue that varied depending on stress-strain distribution throughout the lung. We also observed that the elastic moduli of enzymatically disrupted lung parenchyma increased by at least 64%. The reported methodology enables assessment of the nonlinear viscoelastic characteristics of intact lungs under normal and abnormal (i.e., injured, diseased) conditions and allows measurement of mechanical properties of tissue-mimetic biomaterials for use in therapeutics or in vitro models. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE: Accurate quantification of tissue stiffness is critical for understanding mechanisms of disease and developing effective therapeutics. Current modalities to measure tissue stiffness are destructive and preclude accurate assessment of lung mechanical properties, as lung mechanics are determined by complex features of the intact lung. To address the need for alternative methods to assess lung mechanics, we report a non-destructive vacuum-based approach to quantify tissue stiffness. We applied this method to correlate lung tissue mechanics with tissue disruption, and to assess the stiffness of biomaterials. This method can be used to inform the development of tissue-mimetic materials for use in therapeutics and disease models, and could potentially be applied for in-situ evaluation of tissue stiffness as a diagnostic or prognostic tool.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE