抄録
A pipette aspiration technique has been developed to clarify the local anisotropic stiffness of soft biological tissues. This technique provides a simple and practical method of measuring an initial elastic modulus by comparing the slope of the pressure-deformation curve obtained from a finite element analysis with that obtained by experiment using a pipette to aspirate the tissue surface. In previous studies, linear numerical simulations were performed for circular cross-sectional pipettes using an axisymmetric model that is assumed to be isotropic and homogeneous. In this paper, the use of rectangular cross-sectional pipettes was proposed to parametrically evaluate the effects of anisotropic properties of living tissues on the measurement of their stiffness. The calculated results indicated that rectangular pipettes eliminated the effect of the modulus parallel to the pipette major axis. The aspiration technique with a rectangular cross-sectional pipette should be effective for clarifying the anisotropy of biological tissues. Experimental verification of this technique was performed for the canine ligamentum nuchae.
