Linking Myometrial Physiology to Intrauterine Pressure; How Tissue-Level Contractions Create Uterine Contractions of Labor
Figure 7
Two tissues linked end-to-end in isometric contractility experiment.
A. Simulation where both tissues express repetitive contractions, but the tissues are contracting out-of-phase. B. Out-of-phase contractions experimentally recorded from two rat myometrial tissue strips demonstrating alternating contraction pattern corresponding to A (from ref. 16). “L” is the bioelectrical activity of the left tissue strip; “R” is the bioelectrical activity of the right tissue strip. C. Simulation after increasing the starting pressure, but keeping all other input values the same as in A, reveals in-phase contractions. D. Returning the starting pressure to the value in A, but decreasing the refractory duration also couples the tissue into an in-phase pattern.