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Human heart valve allografts mechanical and morphological properties according to duration of tissue cryopreservation
Fiala, Radovan ; Burkert, Jan (advisor) ; Dominik, Jan (referee) ; Rosenberg, Josef (referee)
Background: The aortic and pulmonary allograft heart valves (AHV) are used in the cardiac surgery for replacing the impaired semilunar valves. They are harvested from donor hearts and cryostored in tissue banks. The expiration period was set to 5 years arbitrarily. We hypothesized that their mechanical and structural properties do not reasonably deteriorate after this period. Methods: A total of 64 human AHV (31 aortic and 33 pulmonary) of different length of cryopreservation (fresh, 0-5, 5-10, over 10 years) were sampled to different tissue strips (artery, leaflet, ventriculo-arterial junction, arterial ring) and tested by tensile test with loading velocity 10 mm/min until tissue rupture. Neighbouring regions of tissue were processed histologically and evaluated for elastin and collagen area fraction. The results were evaluated statistically. Results: In aortic AHV, the physical deformation response of wall samples to stress did not changed significantly neither during the process of cryopreservation nor during the first 10 years of storage. In pulmonary AHV, the ultimate strain dropped after 5 years of cryopreservation indicating that pulmonary artery was significantly less deformable at the time of rupture. On the other hand, the ultimate stress was equal during the first 10 years of...
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