ABSTRACT
Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is a relatively recent noninvasive imaging approach that provides in vivo data about the biomechanical properties of tissue. With manual palpation being an integral part of many diagnostic procedures, it is obvious that elasticity imaging has many interesting and promising potentials in medical imaging, that is, from lesion/tissue detection and characterization to physiology assessment and therapy follow-up. The general concept of MRE is to transmit low-frequency mechanical waves into the object and image those waves using MRI motionsensitized sequences. This allows for locally solving for the stress-strain relationship, yielding the complex-valued shear modulus. Many different technical realizations exist (static, dynamic, and transient), which all probe tissue characteristics in the frequency domain. Despite the challenges of applying MRE in the heart, MRE has a large potential for revealing intrinsic myocardial mechanical properties based on studying the stress-strain relationship. This is expected to help better understand the nature of the cardiac workload and pathophysiological effects on the heart function.
