An active finite viscoelastic model for gastric smooth muscle contraction

Abstract

A coupled electromechanical model to describe the transduction process of cellular electrical activity into mechanical deformation has been presented. The model consolidates a biophysical smooth muscle cell model, a biophysical actin-myosin interaction model, a sliding filament model and a viscoelastic constitutive model to construct an active finite viscoelastic model. The key input to this model is an electrical pulse which then estimates the resulting stress and deformation in the cell. The proposed model was used to recreate experimental observations performed on canine and porcine gastric tissue strips. In all cases, the simulation results were well matched with the experimental data (R2 > 0.9).