High‐fidelity biomechanical models usually involve the mechanical characterisation of biological tissues using experimental methods based on optical measurements. In most experiments, strains are evaluated based on displacements of a few markers and represents an average within the region of interest (ROI). Full‐field measurements may improve description of non‐homogeneous materials such as soft tissues. The approach based on non‐rigid image registration is proposed and compared with standard digital image correlation (DIC) on a set of samples, including (i) complex heterogeneous deformations with sub‐pixel displacement, (ii) a typical uniaxial tension test of aorta, and (iii) an indentation test on skin. The possibility to extend the ROI to the whole sample and the exploitation of a natural tissue pattern represents the main assets of the proposed method whereas the results show similar accuracy as standard DIC when analysing sub‐pixel deformations. Therefore, displacement and strain fields measurement based on image registration is very promising to characterise heterogeneous specimens with irregular shapes and/or small dimensions, which are typical features of soft biological tissues.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.