Confronting a mathematically derived constitutive law for the myocardium with experimental data

The global myocardium contraction relies on the local deformation of its contractile cells. These small structures are rod-shaped and linked together by straight or Y-shaped junctions. A previous work introduced a discrete homogenization procedure that can be applied to the overall nonlinearly elastic lattice in order to derive an equivalent macroscopic constitutive law. Recent experimental measurements on cardiomyocytes allow us to give physiological grounds to the proposed method and to perform comparisons with well-known global laws.