Jaremy Creechley
Northwest Tissue Mechanics Laboratory
Characterizing the fatigue life
of the bovine meniscus
Jaremy Creechley is
graduating this spring
with a Master’s of
Material Science and
Engineering. Previously
he earned a Master’s in
Computer Science while
working as a full time
software developer at
Clearwater Analytics.
After graduating this
spring he is creating a
technology startup
company in the Boise
area to develop software
and eventually
embedded devices. His
research interests include
a wide range of scientific
fields from biomechanics
to hardware and
software design.
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.