In a recent study published in Acta Biomaterialia, researchers investigated the contractile behavior of mouse left ventricle myocardial tissues. They examined active and passive behaviors at the fiber, tissue, and organ levels. The research aims to improve understanding of multiscale determinants of contractility and identify multiscale performance metrics of heart tissue contractility. These metrics can be used to study a variety of structural heart diseases to assess the multiscale mechanisms of contractility impairments.
The results show that tissue activation-relaxation behavior under isometric conditions was qualitatively similar to that of the papillary muscle fiber bundle. However, maximum stress developed in the tissue was an order of magnitude lower, and the time taken for active forces to plateau was more than 10 times longer. The study highlights the importance of multiscale characterization in providing insights into contractile adaptation mechanisms of the heart with impaired systolic function.
The team used the CellScale BioTester biaxial test system to measure the left ventricle tissues.
Read this paper here.