Hydraulic Permeability reconstruction in Magnetic Resonance Elstography

Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) is a rapidly developing, non-invasive, imaging technique for acquiring information about tissue properties similar to the way surgeons use manual palpation. At the mm³ voxel level, tissue is treated as a coarse grained medium - much of the MRE field has assumed that using a viscoelastic continuum is sufficient to characterize wave propogation within tissue. Poroelasticity, on the other hand, is a coarse grained description of a viscoelastic porous skeleton interacting with a fluid - qualitatively more in line with what we know tissue is like. I will explore recent advances made by our group in applying poroelasticity to MRE data, focusing on the inference of hydraulic permeability - a tissue's capacity for permitting fluid to filtrate through it - in both simulations and phantoms, paving the way for eventual clinical use.