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Fatigue exhaustion of the mitral valve tissue

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Abstract

Sudden failure and rupture of the tissue is a rare but serious short-term complication after the mitral valve surgical repair. Excessive cyclic loading on the suture line of the repair can progressively damage the surrounding tissue and finally cause tissue rupture. Moreover, mechanical over-tension, which occurs in a diseased mitral valve, gradually leads to tissue floppiness, mitral annular dilation, and leaflet rupture. In this work, the rupture mechanics of mitral valve is studied by characterizing the fracture toughness exhaustion of healthy tissue. Results of this study show that fracture toughness of the posterior mitral valve is lower than its anterior counterpart, indicating that posterior tissue is more prone to failure. Moreover, the decrease in fracture toughness by increasing the number of fatigue cycles shows that excessive mechanical loading leads to progressive failure and rupture of mitral valve tissue within a damage accumulative process.

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Notes

  1. Mitral annuloplasty, the main repair technique of MR, consists of suturing a prosthetic ring to the annulus and shrinking the valve orifice to the normal or undersized dimensions.

  2. Olymel Corp., Saint-Esprit, QC, Canada.

  3. Needle insertion can also be considered as a practical technique for measuring fracture toughness in soft biological tissue (Azar and Hayward 2008).

  4. The results of the control group, not subjected to fatigue loading, can be found in Table 1.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Mr. Boby Chu for the design and fabrication of the fatigue and the fracture toughness devices and Dr. Amir K. Miri Ramsheh for helping us to set up and to calibrate the devices. We also thank NSERC, Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and FRQNT, Quebec’s Fonds de recherche du Québec Nature et Technologies, for their financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Koch Institute for Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 500 Main St., Cambridge, MA, 02140, USA

    Farhad Javid

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, 817 Sherbrooke St. W., Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0C3, Canada

    Nastaran Shahmansouri, Jorge Angeles & Rosaire Mongrain

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Centre for Intelligent Machines, McGill University, 3480 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2A7, Canada

    Jorge Angeles

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  1. Farhad Javid
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Correspondence to Farhad Javid.

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Javid, F., Shahmansouri, N., Angeles, J. et al. Fatigue exhaustion of the mitral valve tissue. Biomech Model Mechanobiol 18, 89–97 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10237-018-1070-3

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