When they are damaged or injured, soft biological tissues are able to self-repair and heal. Mechanics is critical during the healing process, as the damaged extracellular matrix (ECM) tends to be replaced with a new undamaged ECM supporting homeostatic stresses. Computational modeling has been commonly used to simulate the healing process. However, there is a pressing need to have a unified thermodynamics theory for healing. From the viewpoint of continuum damage mechanics, some key parameters related to healing processes, for instance, the volume fraction of newly grown soft tissue and the growth deformation, can be regarded as internal variables and have related evolution equations. This paper is aiming to establish this unified framework inspired by thermodynamics for continuum damage models for healing of soft biological tissues, in which we introduce for the first time the coupled description of damage/healing and growth/remodeling based on thermodynamic considerations. Therefore, this new model is more concise and offers a universal approach to simulate the healing process. Three numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, which are in good agreement with the existing works, including an application for balloon angioplasty in an arteriosclerotic artery with a fiber cap.

当它们受损或受伤时，软生物组织能够自我修复和愈合。力学在愈合过程中至关重要，因为受损的细胞外基质 (ECM) 往往会被支持稳态压力的新的未损坏 ECM 所取代。计算建模已被普遍用于模拟愈合过程。然而，迫切需要有一个统一的热力学理论来进行治疗。从连续介质损伤力学的角度来看，一些与愈合过程相关的关键参数，例如新生长的软组织的体积分数和生长变形，可以看作是内部变量，并具有相关的演化方程。本文旨在建立一个受热力学启发的统一框架，用于软生物组织愈合的连续损伤模型，其中我们首次介绍了基于热力学考虑的损伤/愈合和生长/重塑的耦合描述。因此，这个新模型更加简洁，并提供了一种模拟愈合过程的通用方法。提供了三个数值例子来证明所提出模型的有效性，它们与现有工作非常吻合，包括在带有纤维帽的动脉硬化动脉中应用球囊血管成形术。