Increased vascular stiffness is fundamental to hypertension, and its complications, including atherosclerosis, suggest that therapy should also be directed at vascular stiffness, rather than just the regulation of peripheral vascular resistance. It is currently held that the underlying mechanisms of vascular stiffness in hypertension only involve the extracellular matrix and endothelium. We hyp...

Dynamic joint stiffness determines the relation between joint position and torque, and plays a vital role in the control of posture and movement. Dynamic joint stiffness can be quantified during quasi-stationary conditions using disturbance experiments, where small position perturbations are applied to the joint and the torque response is recorded. Dynamic joint stiffness is composed of intrins...

The biomechanical properties of the extracellular matrix (ECM) play an important role in cell migration, gene expression, and differentiation. Biomechanics measurements of ECM are usually performed on cryotomed tissue sections. However, studies on cell/matrix interplay are impossible to perform due to disruptions in cell viability and tissue architecture from freeze-thaw cycling. We developed a...

Author: GAUDIN Michael Affiliation: DER Electricite De France Title: INVERSE IDENTIFICATION AND UPDATING IN VIBRATIONS OF PIPING SYSTEMS Text: This paper concerns the area of vibrations in piping systems of nuclear power plants. One need to represent as better as possible the dynamic behaviour of those systems with respect to the measurements performed on a real structure. In a software develop...

Tumor invasion and metastasis are strongly regulated by biophysical interactions between tumor cells and the extracellular matrix (ECM). While the influence of ECM stiffness on cell migration, adhesion, and contractility has been extensively studied in 2D culture, extension of this concept to 3D cultures that more closely resemble tissue has proven challenging, because perturbations that change...

Cartilage molecular changes in osteoarthritis are most commonly related to the degradation and loss of proteoglycan and collagen fibrils of the extracellular matrix, which directly influence tissue stiffness and compression-generated streaming potentials. In this study, we evaluated the potential of a new technique, spatially resolved mapping of streaming potentials, to non-destructively indica...

Starting from the definition of a stiffness matrix, the authors present a new formulation of the Cartesian stiffness matrix of parallel mechanisms. The proposed formulation is more general than any other stiffness matrix found in the literature since it can take into account the stiffness of the passive joints, it can consider additional compliances in the joints or in the links and it remains ...