Regenerative Elastography: Monitoring Soft Tissue Reconstruction

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Tissue engineering involves time- and sequence-dependent procedures where the final outcome is unknown until the restored tissue is formed and functioning. Monitoring changes in the biomechanical properties during tissue development, maturation, ageing, and the onset of disease is critical to the design of new tissue engineering techniques for tissue repair and regeneration. Non-invasive periodic monitoring of the stiffness of a tissue-engineered construct during tissue growth would enable instantaneous non-destructive means for tissue differentiation and development. Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is such a technique that measures the viscoelastic properties of soft biological tissues in a non-invasive manner. MRE generates images that depict shear wave motion from which we can calculate local values of the tissue stiffness. MRE, as currently applied, cannot be used to study small biological tissues, or to image in vivo thin tissue regions, such as articular cartilage with thickness less than 2 mm and distinct structure in sub millimeter layers. Recently, we have extended MRE to the microscopic scale and have referred to it as microscopic MR elastography (