Figure 3.

(a) Effective equibiaxial mechanical response of the MV leaflet at each pregnancy stage (adapted from [12]). Tension is plotted against the ratio between the current and stress-free specimen areas. The leaflet apparently stiffens in EP, but recovers its original behaviour by LP. (b) Representative fit of the MSSCM to biaxial mechanical data for an MV leaflet specimen, illustrating the individual contributions of collagen (red) and elastin (green). The left curve corresponds to the circumferential response, whereas the right curve corresponds to the radial response. Model fits achieved R² = 0.940 on average. (Online version in colour.)