PURPOSE The values of the biomechanical human eyeball model parameters reported in the literature are still being disputed. The primary motivation behind this work was to predict the material parameters of the cornea through numerical simulations and to assess the applicability of the ubiquitously accepted law of applanation tonometry - the Imbert-Fick equation. METHODS Numerical simulations ...

Mechanical ventilation is the standard life-support technique for patients with severe acute respiratory failure. However, some patients develop persistent and refractory hypoxemia because their lungs are so severely damaged that they are unable to respond to the application of high inspired oxygen concentration and high levels of positive end-expiratory pressure. In this article, we review cur...

The advances in micro- and nanofabrication technologies enable the preparation of increasingly smaller mechanical transducers capable of detecting the forces, motion, mechanical properties and masses that emerge in biomolecular interactions and fundamental biological processes. Thus, biosensors based on nanomechanical systems have gained considerable relevance in the last decade. This review pr...

Motivated by neuropsychological investigations of category-specific impairments, many functional brain imaging studies have found distinct patterns of neural activity associated with different object categories. However, the extent to which these category-related activation patterns reflect differences in conceptual representation remains controversial. To investigate this issue, functional mag...

Acoustic impedance mismatch at the fluid-wall interface was shown to affect the spectra from an intravascular Doppler device in an in vitro model with a diameter typical of human coronary arteries. Measurements were obtained first under Poiseuille flow conditions with impedance mismatches of 0%, 7% and 12%, and then under stenosed conditions for the 0% and 7% mismatch cases. For the zero mismat...

Mechanics is shown to be an important, perhaps central component to the differentiation and development of embryos. Mechanics of the nucleus may also be involved in determining which genes are expressed in a given cell. There are two major approaches at present to the mechanics of differentiation in embryos: morphomechanics and differentiation waves. These are compared in detail, to provide a s...

Pigment patterning in animals generally occurs during early developmental stages and has ecological, physiological, ethological, and evolutionary significance. Despite the relative simplicity of color patterns, their emergence depends upon multilevel complex processes. Thus, theoretical models have become necessary tools to further understand how such patterns emerge. Recent studies have reeval...

This paper deals with model validation in structural dynamics for a family of quasiidentical structures in the context of uncertain measurements. The crucial point is for the engineer to be able to quantify the quality of the model, which is probabilistic with respect to a set of measurements from which a probability density function can be extracted. Our approach is based on the ”mechanical co...

Biological materials possess a variety of artful interfaces whose size and properties are adapted to their hierarchical levels and functional requirements. Bone, nacre, and wood exhibit an impressive fracture resistance based mainly on small crystallite size, interface organic adhesives and hierarchical microstructure. Currently, little is known about mechanical concepts in macroscopic biologic...

The bacterial chromosome is under varying levels of mechanical stress due to a high degree of crowding and dynamic protein-DNA interactions experienced within the nucleoid. DNA tension is difficult to measure in cells and its functional significance remains unclear although in vitro experiments have implicated a range of biomechanical phenomena. Using single-molecule tools, we have uncovered a ...