Suture Displacement Testing in Uniaxial
Skin Loading
Name: Jeremy Chin
Class: BE 210
It has previously been shown that fabric samples sutured with vertical mattress stitches will have significantly less strain, greater ultimate strength (1), and greater stiffness (2) under equal loading levels than horizontal mattress stitches, and that skin oriented perpendicularly to the bone has a greater elastic modulus and failure stress than skin in the parallel direction.
Therefore, this experiment will again evaluate the quality of the vertical and horizontal mattress techniques, but instead of using fabric, will make use of real skin samples for better simulation of actual surgical situations in uniaxial loading conditions, since real skin has a much greater overall elasticity qualitatively compared to stiff fabric, which was used previously. Aside from being simply another test to verify previous results, this experiment can quantify whether the difference in suture performance is ultimately significant relative to skin deformation.