COMPARISON OF QUALITATIVE CRITERIA IN DECISION ON NUMBER OF COLLAGEN FIBRE FAMILIES IN SOFT TISSUES

Abstract

: In biomechanics of soft tissues, especially of arteries, collagen fibres play an important role. They are arranged in different directions creating thus fibre families with a main direction and a certain dispersion. The number of this families in different arteries and their layers is still questionable although many researchers presume existence of two helical fibre families. We have analysed histograms published in three papers and shown that the presumption on two fibre families may be misleading; in some cases, unimodal or isotropic distributions gave a better quality of the fit than the bimodal distribution. Although we expected that information criteria could strengthen our objections against the generally applied assumption on two fibre families in arterial wall, this was not confirmed and the preferred approximation function was always the same for both of the compared criteria (Akaike information criterion and coefficient of determination R 2 ).