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PeerJ, PeerJ, (5), p. e4005, 2017

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4005

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A unified approach to model peripheral nerves across different animal species

Journal article published in 2017 by Elisabetta Giannessi, Maria Rita Stornelli, Pier Nicola Sergi
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Peripheral nerves are extremely complex biological structures. The knowledge of their response to stretch is crucial to better understand physiological and pathological states (e.g., due to overstretch). Since their mechanical response is deterministically related to the nature of the external stimuli, theoretical and computational tools were used to investigate their behaviour. In this work, a Yeoh-like polynomial strain energy function was used to reproduce the response ofin vitroporcine nerve. Moreover, this approach was applied to different nervous structures coming from different animal species (rabbit, lobster,Aplysia) and tested for different amount of stretch (up to extreme ones). Starting from this theoretical background, in silico models of both porcine nerves and cerebro-abdominal connective ofAplysiawere built to reproduce experimental data (R2 > 0.9). Finally, bi-dimensional in silico models were provided to reduce computational time of more than 90% with respect to the performances of fully three-dimensional models.