Mechanical Properties of Chondrocytes Estimated from Different Models of Micropipette Aspiration (Biophysical Journal)

In this study, two viscoelastic creep expressions for the aspirated length of individual solid-like cells undergoing micropipette aspiration (MPA) were derived based on our previous studies, wherein the cell size relative to the micropipette and the cell compressibility were taken into account. Next, three mechanical models of MPA, the half-space model (HSM), incompressible sphere model (ICSM), and compressible sphere model (CSM), were employed to fit the MPA data of chondrocytes. The results indicated that the elastic moduli and viscoelastic parameters of chondrocytes for the ICSM and CSM exhibited significantly higher values than those from HSM (p < 0.001) due to the considerations of the geometric parameter (?) and the compressibility of cell (?).