Development and approbation of a mobile test bench for mechanical uniaxial compression testing of biological tissues

A technique and a prototype of a mobile test bench for conducting experiments on uniaxial compression of biological tissue samples have been developed. The test bench consists of high-precision scales, an electronic caliper with modified grips, and a video camera. With the help of the test bench, a series of experiments (120 in total) was carried out to determine Young's modulus of atherosclerotic plaques and vascular walls removed from the human body no later than a few hours. A database of plaques and artery walls' mechanical characteristics, as close as possible to their real strength properties, has been formed. In addition, regression dependencies linking Hounsfield units and Young’s moduli of atherosclerotic plaques were constructed. The uniaxial compression technique has been verified on the Instron 3342 universal testing machine. Also, to demonstrate the applicability of the developed technique and test bench for uniaxial compression of hard tissues, experiments were conducted with 14 samples of bovine spongy bone.