Mechanical behaviour of anisotropic soft biological tissues

Certain soft biological tissues have direction-dependent material behaviour (anisotropy) as a result of heterogeneous distribution of microstructural components. Such tissues include the gastrointestinal tract made up of the oesophagus, stomach, small intestine, colon and rectum. Mechanical characterization of the gastrointestinal tissues has applications within tissue engineering, medical device design, disease detection, and contributes to the general understanding of digestive physiology. Mechanical loading experiments were carried out on healthy tissues of the digestive tract under a variety of conditions. The methods and results of these experiments will be presented, along with the results of microstructural analysis which reveal the distribution of the tissues’ most mechanically relevant fibres. Furthermore, experiments were conducted on gastrointestinal tissues in a diseased state, specifically with colorectal cancer, for the application of surgical margin verification during robot-assisted key-hole surgery. Preliminary results of this will be shared along with plans for future work.