Maintaining the heart's health is one of the largest challenges in medicine due to the proclivity of life-threatening cardiovascular diseases, such as myocardial infarctions. When the heart experiences an infarction, a scar begins forming within an hour of the event, which will continue to grow and weaken the heart’s ability to contract. The myocardium after an infarction will increase in stiffness as the tissue becomes fibrotic; the influx of collagen dampens the flexion of the ventricles and reduces the cardiac output. The nature of the tissue stiffness is vital to understand not only at the tissue level but also at the mesoscopic domain. It is necessary to specify how the primary structural tissue components at the subcellular level contribute to the mechanical behavior of the muscle. To investigate this, we produced a procedure for mapping the mechanical nature of fresh myocardium: using atomic force microscopy to measure the mechanical properties of each structural component imaging determined by our second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy. To coregistered AFM and SHG image, which has not been accomplished previously, we developed a convenient means of marking PDMS to be visible in SHG at 830 nm. Our research draws the line between the macroscopic mechanical behavior of the tissue to the nanoscopic structures.
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