Optical Polarimetric Elastography for Biomechanical Analysis

摘要

To make transformative leaps in human health and wellness, our approach to healthcare must be reimagined. Researchers are pursuing multiple avenues, such as integrating health monitoring systems into wearable devices and leveraging machine learning methods to analyze health data. However, many of these approaches are pursued in isolation, and the resulting data is not cross correlated. By working directly with clinicians and clinician-researchers as well as bioinformaticians, we are identifying and addressing their critical needs. This presentation will discuss a recently developed instrument for measuring the elasticity of living tissue. Inspired by conventional mechanical compression testing, the portable instrument replaces the conventional pressure sensor with an array of optical fiber polarimetric sensors to improve both the resolution and sensitivity. These improvements allow the mechanical properties of unprocessed, living, resected tissue to be analyzed. To date, animal tissue samples (several organ systems and cartilage) have been measured. As a result of the improvement in resolution, micron-scale mechanical deformation behavior has been detected, in agreement with the tissue architecture. More complex investigations into the biomechanical properties of tumors (patient derived xenographs) are ongoing as well as improvements in the system design to accelerate data collection and analysis.