Articular cartilage injuries are debilitating and often lead to osteoarthritis: a foremost cause of disability worldwide. Currently no interventions provide satisfactory long-term outcomes. Successful regeneration of articular cartilage through early stage intervention would be life-changing for millions of individuals. Providing suitable mechanical stimulation to promote articular cartilage regrowth is a
crucial element to achieve success. Articular cartilage is complex with in-homogenous mechanical properties which have not been not well characterised: a clear barrier to designing suitable orthopaedic implants for this application. Furthermore, it is necessary to interrogate intended implants to ensure they are providing appropriate loading to cells throughout the entire volumetric device. Digital volume correlation (DVC) offers the potential for non-destructive three-dimensional visualisation of deformation. The technique relies upon tracking the displacement of features within a sample across three-dimensional scans with successive in-situ loading applied. Analysis provides quantification of displacement and strain components within the three-dimensional volume. A method was developed to utilise the cells within articular cartilage as natural features for DVC and was validated against established 2D histological analysis. DVC of human articular cartilage provided 3D strain measurements with sufficient spatial resolution to inform implant design, with measurements compared against manually-calculated values (R2 = 0.93). Subsequently DVC of novel hybrid materials implants enabled strain to be visualised within individual struts of the scaffolds (R2 = 0.98): providing the necessary intra-device resolution for successful matching of mechanical properties. Finally the complete tissue-biomaterial system was assessed using DVC with an explant analysed after six weeks of implantation within an ovine model, enabling measurement of implant micromotion and strain fields across the system components. In conclusion, DVC was successfully utilised to characterise strain within articular cartilage, novel biomaterials and tissue-biomaterial systems. Incorporating the technique as part of the device development pathway could be an effective tool to regenerate articular cartilage.