Development of a scanning needle microscopy for an elasticity distribution imaging of rat liver cirrhosis

Abstract

In regenerative therapy, it is of paramount importance to diagnose functional potentiality of mechanical permanence before transfer to a patient, however, there has not been developed any devices available for such diagnosis. On the other hand, we recently developed a Tactile Mapping System (TMS) that topographically measures elastic modulus of tissues and has been widely used to study the relationship between stiffness of organs and their histological structure. In this report, distribution of elastic modulus over a submerged fresh slice of rat liver cirrhosis, hepatitis and normal liver were measured, and the elasticity images were compared. As a result, a degree of pathological regions and cirrhotic progress were clearly identified from those images without any staining protocols.