Handling complexity of soft biological tissues mechanics through practice and open science resources: Application to the spherical compression of a muscle

In the context of innovative medicine, data collection and management are paramount. The need of training is crucial to prepare future engineers and researchers to help and find consistent values and build substitute materials that are still in progress for the large variety of soft biological tissues. Through various lectures, graduate students have been encouraged to pay attention to the complex behaviour of soft biological tissues but practical applications are rarely described and this work aims to fill this lack. Therefore, a short practical session was designed combining most of the phenomena. Thanks to spherical compression tests as well as sample preparations in different environments, this paper aims at: i) pointing difficulties that students and future biomedical engineers might encounter, ii) showing how computational tools are powerful to get an interpretation of experimental results and iii) providing a procedure to allow experimenting macroscopic mechanical characterisation. The practical laboratory session was shaped, for a group of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mn>12</mml:mn> </mml:math> mechanical engineering students. Mechanical and environmental tests provided sufficient data to draw their attention about the complex behaviour of soft biological tissues. Meanwhile, the numerical techniques gave fast and efficient results with an analytical model limited by strong assumptions and tackled by finite element analysis. Based on eight years of practice, this work was a good way to introduce graduate students to biomechanical characterisation of soft biological samples through open science resources, using a theoretical model combined to computational tools.