Mechanical and microstructural characterization of the human tunica albuginea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The tunica albuginea (TA) is a fibrous connective membrane surrounding the corpora cavernosa (CC), which plays a crucial role in the erection. In case of erectile dysfunction, inflatable penile prothesis (IPP) may be a treatment of choice and mechanical interactions occur between prostheses and these penile tissues. There is still much to be learned about their mechanical behavior to help to improve IPP and penile surgical techniques. This paper presents the characterization of the TA mechanical behavior combined with the observation of its microstructural organization, as well as the mechanical behavior of the cavernous tissue. Uniaxial tensile tests were performed on 40 TA samples and 17 CC samples collected from 5 post mortem human subjects. TA samples were cut along both longitudinal and circumferential directions, and in both proximal and distal regions. Histological slices were produced from biopsies contiguous to the samples to observe the collagen fiber organization in the TA. We observed that this fiber organization usually schematized by 2 layers of perpendicular fibers is more complex, with some dispersion in the fiber orientations and interlacing of the 2 layers. The mechanical characterization of the TA samples revealed no clear anisotropy but different properties for the proximal and distal locations, whereas the CC showed a very low elastic modulus. These data complement those already published and further analysis of the microstructure of the TA will be needed to explain the variability of the mechanical behavior of the TA in view of selecting and identifying nonlinear behavior models.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".