A mechanobiological computational framework of intestinal healing for sutureless surgical strategies
- 1IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Abstract
Healing of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract following surgical interventions is governed by coupled mechanobiological processes and may lead to severe complications such as perforation or stricture formation. A first comprehensive mechanobiological modeling framework of GI healing is herein proposed. The framework addresses two clinically relevant applications of bioprinting: endoscopic treatment of GI tissue defects and bioprinting-assisted surgical anastomosis. Tissue remodeling is based upon a hyperelastic material model with fiber dispersion coupling the spatiotemporal reaction diffusion dynamics of fibroblasts and cytokines with collagen deposition, reorientation, and plastic deformation. An active stress formulation drives fibroblasts and myofibroblast contraction while a multiplicative decomposition approach is adopted for collagen remodeling as a permanent change. The governing equations are discretised in time with an implicit Euler scheme, finite element in space and solved by a staggered algorithm implemented in the open-source platform FEniCS. Numerical simulations show that the initial collagen fibers content and orientation strongly influence fibroblast infiltration and scar contracture formation. The study quantifies the advantage of having a collagen bioprinted architecture aligned with tissue fibers, to reduce structural remodeling distortion. The model also predicts a strong correlation between collagen deposition and luminal burst pressure during the recovery of mechanical integrity in GI anastomosis.
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BibTeX
@misc{bukhari2026mechanobiological,
title = {{A mechanobiological computational framework of intestinal healing for sutureless surgical strategies}},
author = {s. m. z. s. bukhari and P. Lenarda and R. T. Djoumessi and A. Gizzi and M. Paggi},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.24.753298},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.24.753298v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A mechanobiological computational framework of intestinal healing for sutureless surgical strategies
AU - s. m. z. s. bukhari
AU - P. Lenarda
AU - R. T. Djoumessi
AU - A. Gizzi
AU - M. Paggi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/24
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.24.753298
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.24.753298v1
AB - Healing of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract following surgical interventions is governed by coupled mechanobiological processes and may lead to severe complications such as perforation or stricture formation. A first comprehensive mechanobiological modeling framework of GI healing is herein proposed. The framework addresses two clinically relevant applications of bioprinting: endoscopic treatment of GI tissue defects and bioprinting-assisted surgical anastomosis. Tissue remodeling is based upon a hyperelastic material model with fiber dispersion coupling the spatiotemporal reaction diffusion dynamics of fibroblasts and cytokines with collagen deposition, reorientation, and plastic deformation. An active stress formulation drives fibroblasts and myofibroblast contraction while a multiplicative decomposition approach is adopted for collagen remodeling as a permanent change. The governing equations are discretised in time with an implicit Euler scheme, finite element in space and solved by a staggered algorithm implemented in the open-source platform FEniCS. Numerical simulations show that the initial collagen fibers content and orientation strongly influence fibroblast infiltration and scar contracture formation. The study quantifies the advantage of having a collagen bioprinted architecture aligned with tissue fibers, to reduce structural remodeling distortion. The model also predicts a strong correlation between collagen deposition and luminal burst pressure during the recovery of mechanical integrity in GI anastomosis.
ER -