During the progression of pulmonary hypertension (PH), proximal pulmonary arteries (PAs) undergo remodeling such that they become thicker and the elastic modulus increases. Both of these changes increase the vascular stiffness. The increase in pulmonary vascular stiffness contributes to increased right ventricular (RV) afterload, which causes RV hypertrophy and eventually failure. Studies have ...

The direct problem of free vibration analysis via finite-element formulation is well known: the element mass and stiffness matrices are assembled to form the system mass and stiffness matrices; the problem is reduced to standard eigenvalue form; the eigenvalues and eigenvectors are found. The paper discusses some inverse problems relating to finite-element formulations for simple chain-like str...

Visualization of fourth-order tensors from solid mechanics has not been explored in depth previously. Challenges include the large number of components (3x3x3x3 for 3D), loss of major symmetry and loss of positive definiteness (with possibly zero or negative eigenvalues). This paper presents a decomposition of fourth-order tensors that facilitates their visualization and understanding. Fourth-o...

This work presents an electrophysiologically and dynamically consistent musculoskeletal model to predict stiffness in the human ankle and knee joints as derived from the joints constituent biological tissues (i.e., the spanning musculotendon units). The modeling method we propose uses electromyography (EMG) recordings from 13 muscle groups to drive forward dynamic simulations of the human leg i...