Figure 3. Preinflation technique for mechanical modeling.

Many histology specimens suffered from fixation and embedding artifacts, such as the vessel at left, which is horizontally compressed relative to its in vivo conformation where the lumen would be mostly circular. Consequently, the computed stress and strain distributions were skewed in regions of high deformation during computational analysis (middle). Therefore, we “pre-inflated” vessels by simulating pressure normal to the lumen, allowing the vessel to deform, and re-meshing the vessel for 10 iterations. This extra processing step minimized the effect of tissue artifacts and presented us with more physiologically-relevant anatomy for our analysis (right).