Overview
Biomechanics provides a tremendous selection of new and fascinating areas of application such as the functional adaptation in hard tissues such as bone, teeth, or vertebrae, fracture and healing of bones, mechanically-induced growth and remodeling in arteries, the adaptive response to graft implantation or stenting of vascular tissues, in-stent restenosis, ventricular remodeling, the simulation of actively contracting skeletal or cardiac muscle, and loss or restoration of function in damaged or diseased tissue, to name but a few. When aiming to model biomechanical problems, however, it is important to recognize that in many respects, their behavior is fundamentally different from classical engineering materials: Typically, biological tissues possess a sophisticated hierarchical microstructure, they are clearly anisotropic, often incompressible, sometimes viscous, entropic, either extremely soft or incredibly hard; some tissues are actively generating force upon contraction, and, most importantly, all tissues are living organisms that are capable of adapting to environmental changes in response to disease or clinical invention. The appropriate simulation of biomechanical phenomena thus often implies significant changes in the traditional set of governing equations. This IUTAM Symposium provides a unique forum to discuss both the mathematical equations that characterize specific biological tissues and the computational tools that can be used to simulate their complex spatial and temporal response.
One of the most promising trends to accurately characterize biomechanical phenomena is to explore their response on the cellular level. Observations on the microscopic scale provide additional information about signaling pathways, communications of different components within a cell, communication between different cells, and about the overall cellular response to mechanical, electrical and chemical loads. Ideally, these observations feed back into macroscopic tissue models that help to explain the biomechanical response of the overall tissue or organ. This IUTAM Symposium will initiate close collaboration between world leading experts in molecular, cellular, tissue, and organ level biomechanics to shape pathways in tomorrow's multiscale multiphysics modeling of biomechanical phenomena.