A MICRO-ARCHITECTURAL BASED STRUCTURAL MODEL FOR ELASTOMERIC ELECTROSPUN SCAFFOLDS FOR HEART VALVE TISSUE ENGINEERING

BACKGROUND. Improving how scaffold architectures affect cell morphology, metabolism, phenotypic expression, and predicting mechanical behaviors, are crucial goals in the development of engineered heart valve scaffolds. Studies are required to elucidate how the fibrous microstructure translates into specific tissue (or meso-scale) level mechanical behavior. Deterministic structural models can quantify how key structures contribute to the mechanical response as a function of bulk deformation across multiple scales, as well as provide a better understanding of cellular mechanical response to local micro-structural deformations. An appropriate representative volume element (RVE) size was determ…