This book presents a comprehensive and unifying approach to analytical identification of material properties of biological materials. Focusing on depth-sensing indentation testing, pipette aspiration testing, and torsion of soft tissues, it discusses the following important aspects in detail: damping, adhesion, thickness effect, substrate effect, elastic inhomogeneity effect, and biphasic effect. This book is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers in the area of biomechanics as well as for biomedical engineers interested in contact problems and involved in inverse materials parameters prediction analysis.

The emerging paradigm of incorporating images and biomechanical properties of soft tissues has proven to be an integral part of the advancement of several medical applications, including image guided radiotherapy and surgery, brachytherapy, and diagnostics. This expansion has resulted in a growing community of medical, science, and engineering professionals applying mechanical principles to address medical concerns. This book is tailored to cover a range of mechanical principles, properties, and applications of soft tissues that have previously been addressed in various journals and "anatomical site-specific" books. Biomechanics of Soft Tissues follows a different approach by offering a simplified overview of widely used mechanical models and measuring techniques of soft tissue parameters. This is followed by an investigation of different medical applications, including: biomechanical aspects of cancerous tumor progressions, radiotherapy treatment, and image guided ultrasound guided interventions. Written by leading scholars and professionals in the field, Biomechanics of Soft Tissues combines engineering and medical expertise, thereby producing an excellent source of information for professionals interested in the theoretical and technological advancements related to soft tissues. The book provides medical professionals with an insight on various modeling approaches, testing techniques, and mechanical characteristics that are frequently used by engineers. Conversely, the presented medical applications provide engineers with a glimpse of amazing medical practices and encourage them to expand their roles in the medical field. Provides a simplified overview of mechanics of soft tissues. Highlights different techniques to measure tissues properties for engineering and medical applications. Contains novel ideas to address roles of mechanics in disease progression and treatment. Presents innovative applications of biomechanics in medical procedures.

This book is an attempt to explain hardness measurements of metals in terms of some of their more basic physical properties. The intention is to provide, for physicists, engineers, and metallurgists, a better understanding of what hardness means and what hardness measurements imply. The author emphasises the physical concepts involved, so that non-mathematical readers can grasp and appreciate the general physical picture without needing to follow the more detailed mathematical treatment.

During last couple of years there has been an increasing recognition that problems arising in biology or related to medicine really need a multidisciplinary approach. For this reason some special branches of both applied theoretical physics and mathematics have recently emerged such as biomechanics, mechanobiology, mathematical biology, biothermodynamics. This first section of the book, General notes on biomechanics and mechanobiology, comprises from theoretical contributions to Biomechanics often providing hypothesis or rationale for a given phenomenon that experiment or clinical study cannot provide. It deals with mechanical properties of living cells and tissues, mechanobiology of fracture healing or evolution of locomotor trends in extinct terrestrial giants. The second section, Biomechanical modelling, is devoted to the rapidly growing field of biomechanical models and modelling approaches to improve our understanding about processes in human body. The last section called Locomotion and joint biomechanics is a collection of works on description and analysis of human locomotion, joint stability and acting forces.

In joint replacement surgery with suboptimal bone, allograft materials are often used to achieve biological fixation of the metallic implant to the host bone and reducing the implant fixation time. The most commonly used techniques are cemented and hydroxyapatite (HA)-coated metallic implants. Typically, HA coatings are suggested for patients with better bone stock, whereas recommended implant fixation process for most other osteoporotic patients is bone cements. In general, there is a long-standing need to improve the performance of hip and other devices for longer in vivo implant lifetime that can help in reducing the number of revision surgeries, as well as minimizing physical and mental trauma to the patient. To achieve these goals, it is important to understand the mechanical and biological properties of coatings that can influence not only its short- and long-term bioactivity but also life span in vivo. Over the years, it has been recognized that the stability of a coated implant is governed by its physical and mechanical properties. A coating that separates from the implant provides no advantage over an uncoated implant and undesirable due to problems with debris materials, which can lead to osteolysis. Therefore, it is important to properly characterize the coated implants in terms of its physical and mechanical properties. In this chapter, specific details on coating characterization techniques including sample dimensions, sample preparation, experimental procedure and data interpretation are discussed. In particular, the standards and requirements of regulatory organizations are presented elucidating the significance and use of each characterization. It is important to appreciate that mechanical properties of coatings can only be determined with certain coating specification such as coating thickness. This chapter is designed even for non-experts to follow mechanical property characterizations of coatings on medical implants.

Biomaterials / Ahmed El-Ghannam and Paul Ducheyne -- Biomechanics of the spine / Ian A. F. Stokes and James C. Iatridis -- Biomechanics of fracture fixation and fracture healing / Lutz E. Claes and Keita Ito -- Biomechanics and preclinical testing of artificial joints: the hip / Rik Huiskes and Jan Stolk -- Biomechanics of total knee replacement designs / Peter S. Walker.

This book contains contributions from leading researchers in biomechanics, nanomechanics, tribology, contact mechanics, materials science and applications on various experimental techniques including atomic force microscopy (AFM) for studying soft, biomimetic and biological materials and objects. Biologists, physicists, researchers applying methods of contact mechanics and researchers testing materials using indentation techniques along with many other applied scientists will find this book a useful addition to their libraries. Moreover, several reviews in this book are written as introductions to several important and rather sophisticated research areas such as depth-sensing indentation, studying of biological cells by AFM probes, mechanics of adhesive contact and contact between viscoelastic (hereditary elastic) solids. The book containing new theoretical models, results of experimental studies and numerical simulations, along with reviews of above mentioned areas of contact mechanics in application to biological systems, would be beneficial for researchers in many areas of biology, medicine, engineering, mechanics and biomimetics.