Digital volume correlation for the characterization of musculoskeletal tissues: Current challenges and future developments

Biological tissues are complex hierarchical materials, difficult to characterise due to the challenges associated to the separation of scale and heterogeneity of the mechanical properties at different dimensional levels. The Digital Volume Correlation approach is the only image-based experimental approach that can accurately measure internal strain field within biological tissues under complex loading scenarios. In this minireview examples of DVC applications to study the deformation of musculoskeletal tissues at different dimensional scales are reported, highlighting the potential and challenges of this relatively new technique. The manuscript aims at reporting the wide breath of DVC applications in the past 2 decades and discuss future perspective for this unique technique, including fast analysis, applications on soft tissues, high precision approaches, and clinical applications.