Characterizing the Fatigue Life of the Bovine Meniscus

This study presents the first characterization of bi-directional fatigue life of mammalian meniscal tissue. The results reinforce the importance of studying the impact of bi-directional fatigue in soft tissues with anisotropic fiber orientations. Given that bovine meniscal tissue exhibit similar Young’s moduli and UTS strengths, we assume that this research can guide future work in studying clinical meniscus tears in humans. Our fatigue results build upon prior studies in mammalian tendon fatigue and extend test protocols to make S/N fatigue testing of fibro-cartilage tissues possible. Due to size constraints and the practical difficulties of estimating UTS strengths, S/N properties for meniscus tissue have not been developed. Equally as important is the development of a technique to account for tensile strength variability in soft tissues, particularly in non-preferred fiber orientations. Accounting for population variation reduces the noise in the S/N data enabling smaller population sizes while enabling investigation of the effects of material anisotropy.