Characterization of the skin-to-bone mechanical interaction on porcine scalp: A combined experimental and computational approach

Abstract

Fasciae are soft tissues permitting a large but finite sliding between organs, but also between skin and its underlying elements. The contribution of fasciae has been seldomly reported in the literature, and is usually neglected or overly simplified within simulations. In the present contribution, we propose to use peeling tests in order to quantify the skin-to-bone interaction associated with a simple computational approach based on a geometrical modeling of the skin-to-bone interface. To this aim, a new experimental set up combined with a computational model to characterize the skin-to-bone interaction were proposed. The current work is devoted to the porcine scalp complex since it constitutes a common mechanical surrogate for the human scalp complex. The ad hoc computational approach and peeling set up were firstly evaluated on a validation material, before being used to characterize the skin-to-bone interaction within 6 porcine specimens harvested from the scalp. Our experimental setup allowed to measure the peeling response of porcine scalp, showing a three-regimes response including a plateau force. The computational approach satisfyingly reproduced the peeling response based uniquely on experimental-based parameters and on a discrete modeling of skin-to-bone interface. The presented methodology is a first attempt to propose a computationally efficient geometrically based model able to take into account the skin-to-bone interaction up to failure and corroborated by experimental data, and may be largely extended to the modeling of soft interactions between biological human tissues in the future.

Keywords: Conjonctive tissue; Fasciae; Finite element modeling; Interface; Peeling; Skin-to-bone modeling; Soft tissue testing.