Towards the non-invasive determination of the mechanical properties of living human soft tissue

摘要

Non-invasive analysis of the motion and mechanical properties of living human soft tissue is vital to impact biomechanics, rehabilitation engineering, surgical simulation and diagnostic oncology. Muscle tissue is the most abundant soft tissue in the human body, and plays an important protective role, thus its constitutive properties need to be understood to allow for the improvement of computational models. The current study uses indentation tests on the upper arm of healthy volunteers, combined with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based non-invasive measurement of 3D tissue deformation, and inverse finite element analysis (FEA), to derive the non-linear material properties of passive living human skeletal muscle tissue. This paper presents the development of a novel realtime non-invasive MRI sequence, a custom designed MRI compatible indentor (incorporating a novel optical force sensor) and application of these in human volunteer tests in which the complex force history and inhomogeneous tissue deformation were recorded. This is the first study to simultaneously record the non-linear and anisotropic 3D deformation of living human soft tissue in combination with real-time force measurement. These results for the first time provide the necessary boundary conditions to apply inverse FEA to reveal the complex material parameters of living human skeletal muscle tissue.