Fig 2. Schematic of the hierarchical Bayesian model posed to capture the experimentally-measured mechanical response of a set of Ns inter-related tissue specimens.
A set of 3(m + 1) hyperdistributions, common across all specimens, generates the mNs mechanical model parameters corresponding to each tested specimen, and the Ns parameters representing experimental uncertainty. These parameters yield deterministic predictions for the mechanical behavior of each specimen, which are to be compared to the corresponding experimental evidence in order to establish a best-fitting set of hyperparameters.