A compact 0.5 T MR elastography device and its application for studying viscoelasticity changes in biological tissues during progressive formalin fixation.

PURPOSE: To develop a method of compact tabletop magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) for rheological tests of tissue samples and to measure changes in viscoelastic powerlaw constants of liver and brain tissue during progressive fixation. METHODS: A 10-mm bore, 0.5-T permanent-magnet-based MRI system was equipped with a gradient-amplifier-controlled piezo-actuator and motion-sensitive spin echo sequence for inducing and measuring harmonic shear vibrations in cylindrical samples. Shear modulus dispersion functions were acquired at 200-5700 Hz in animal tissues at different states of formalin fixation and fitted by the springpot powerlaw model to obtain shear modulus µ and powerlaw exponent α. RESULTS: In a frequency range of 300-1500 Hz, unfixed liver tissue was softer and less dispersive than brain tissue with µ = 1.68 ± 0.17 kPa and α = 0.51 ± 0.06 versus µ = 2.60 ± 0.68 kPa and α = 0.68 ± 0.03. Twenty-eight hours of formalin fixation yielded a 400-fold increase in liver µ, 25-fold increase in brain µ, and two-fold reduction in α of both tissues. CONCLUSION: Compact 0.5-T MRE facilitates automated measurement of shear modulus dispersion in biological tissue at low costs. Formalin fixation changes the viscoelastic properties of tissues from viscous-soft to elastic-stiff more markedly in liver than brain. Magn Reson Med 79:470-478, 2018. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

Tabletop magnetic resonance elastography for the measurement of viscoelastic parameters of small tissue samples.

We demonstrate the feasibility of low-cost tabletop MR elastography (MRE) for quantifying the complex shear modulus G(∗) of small soft biological tissue samples as provided by pathologists. The MRE system was developed based on a tabletop MRI scanner equipped with a 0.5 T permanent magnet and a tissue sample holder mounted to a loudspeaker. A spin echo sequence was enhanced with motion-encoding gradients of 250 mT/m amplitude synchronized to acoustic vibration frequencies. Shear wave images suitable for elastography were acquired between vibration frequencies of 0.5 and 1 kHz in agarose, ultrasound gel, porcine liver, porcine skeletal muscle, and bovine heart with a spatial resolution of 234 µm pixel edge length. The measured frequency dependence of G(∗) agreed well with previous work based on high-field MR systems. The ratio between loss and storage moduli was highest in liver and ultrasound gel, followed by muscle tissue and agarose gel while ultrasound gel and liver showed similarly low storage moduli compared to the other samples. The shear wave to noise ratio is an important imaging criteria for MRE and was about 4.2 times lower for the preliminary setup of the 0.5 T tabletop system compared to a 7 T animal scanner. In the future, the new tabletop MRE system may serve as a low cost device for preclinical research on the correlation of viscoelastic parameters with histopathology of biological samples.