Abstract
Atherosclerosis is a disease which may cause a death with a rupture of plaque. Identification of mechanical properties of atherosclerotic vessels is essential for their prevention and treatment. We compared the experimental force-displacement data of strip-like specimen of a carotid artery with a lipid core and displacement data from digital image correlation (DIC) method with results from finite element analysis (FEA), and determined the material constants of incompressible isotropic hyperelastic models for the regions of vascular wall and lipid core. We used neo-Hookean for lipid core and reduced polynomial for vascular wall. The deformation of the specimen was reproduced qualitatively under stretching the upper gripper, but the displacement of a region analyzed by DIC was overestimated by the FEA. The deformation of the specimen was insensitive to the Young's moduli of 3, 30 and 66 kPa for the lipid core.
