Tensile tests of porcine pericardial tissue for aortic heart valve leaflets

The heart valve defects arc still a very serious problem for cardiologists among the many cardiovascular diseases. Aortic valve stenosis or aortic regurgitation are the most common defects of heart valves. One of the most effective methods of treatment of patients with advanced aortic stenosis is the replacement for mechanical or biological prosthesis. Nowadays, the development of innovative structural heart valvular prostheses requires the use of specialized computer software to support the design and simulation of the device operation. Experimental and modeling studies arc necessary to design prosthetic heart valves. These studies provide valuable information about mechanical properties of materials used in the construction of valves. The materials used to construct leaflets of prosthetic aortic valve are biological or synthetic. Bovine pericardium, porcine aortic valve tissue and recently porcine pericardial tissue are applied in biological heart valve prostheses. In this study, mechanical properties of porcine pericardial tissue were investigated. The aim of this paper is to compare the results of experimental and numerical studies using uniaxial tensile tests in two directions: radial and circumferential. Results from numerical model are compared with the results from experimental studies that have been conducted on the static testing machine MTS Insight 10.