Clinically Applied Biomaterials: Soft Tissue

So tissues are dened as tissues that connect, support, or surround other structures and organs such as tendons, ligaments, skin, muscles, and blood vessels. Two of the primary components of so tissues are elastin and collagen. Elastin provides elasticity to the tissues and collagen provides form and strength [1]. ese tissues are incompressible, are generally anisotropic, and oen demonstrate viscoelastic properties such as stress relaxation, creep, and hysteresis. Annually, several million Americans are aicted with so tissue loss due to trauma or disease. Treatment options include reconstruction with tissue gras and prosthetics [2]. e rst step to adequately replacing a tissue is to determine the physiological loadings and native mechanical properties [1]. e physical properties of the biomaterial can then be designed to match the native tissue by selecting appropriate material properties. Fabrication and processing techniques strongly inuence gra properties and can be used to further tune properties to match the target tissue [3, 4].