501 Biomechanics and Mechanobiology of Soft Tissues

 

Soft tissues such as blood vessels, skin, muscle, cardiac tissue, cerebral tissue or ocular tissue play important roles in many areas of medicine and biomedical engineering. The biomechanics of soft tissues has thus attracted rapidly increasing interest over the last two decades. Sophisticated constitutive models have been proposed to describe the elastic and inelastic behavior of such tissues. Moreover, mechanobiology, that is, the interplay between mechanical stimuli such as stresses or strains and biological processes, has been identified as a key mechanism governing the long term behavior of soft tissues under mechanical loading. The biomechanics and mechanobiology of soft tissues is governed by an interplay of various mechanical, biochemical and biological processes on different time and length scales and thus often best addressed by advanced computational models.
This minisymposium focuses on current challenges in the various areas of soft tissue biomechanics and mechanobiology. Its scope includes in particular multi-scale modeling (from sub-cellular to organ scale), multi-physics modeling (e.g., combining mechanics and biochemistry), mechanics of active tissues, mechano-regulated growth and remodeling (and the underlying mechano-sensing and mechano-transduction on the micro-scale) as well as validation of computational models by experiments and computer-aided design of experiments.