Many colonic surgeries include colorectal anastomoses whose leaks may be life-threatening, affecting thousands of patients annually. Various studies propose that mechanical interaction between the staples and neighboring tissues may play an important role in anastomotic leakage. Therefore, understanding the mechanical behavior of colorectal tissue is essential to characterizing the reasons for this type of failure. So far, experimental data characterizing the mechanical properties of colorectal tissue have been few and inconsistent, which has significantly limited understanding their behavior. This research proposes an approach to developing an anisotropic hyperelastic material model for colorectal tissues based on uniaxial testing of freshly harvested porcine specimens, which were collected from several age- and weight-matched pigs. The specimens were extracted from the same colon tract of each pig along their circumferential and longitudinal orientations. We propose a constitutive model combining Yeoh isotropic hyperelastic material with fibers oriented in two directions to account for the hyperelastic and anisotropic nature of colorectal tissues. Experimental data were used to accurately determine the model's coefficients (circumferential, R2 = 0.9968; longitudinal, R2 = 0.9675). The results show that the proposed model can be incorporated into a finite element model that can simulate procedures such as colorectal anastomoses reliably.
Keywords: colorectal tissues; experimental characterization; soft tissue modeling.