Fractional order viscoelasticity in characterization for atrial tissue

Atrial tissue due to its solid-like and fluid-like constituents shows highly viscoelastic properties. Up to now, the distribution pattern of muscle fiber in heart is not well established, and it is hard to establish the constitutive model for atrial tissue completely based on the microstructure level. Consider the equivalence between the fractional viscoelasticity and the fractal spring-dashpot model, a generalized fractional order Maxwell model is proposed to model the porcine atrial tissue in the phenomenological sense. This model has a simple expression and intuitively physical meanings. The constitutive parameters in the model are estimated in the complex domain by a genetic algorithm. Final results illustrate the proposed model gets a well agreement with the experimental data.