Biophysical Bases of Elasticity Imaging

The role of focal adhesion kinase in tumor initiation and progression

“…27 Interestingly, regions of local invasion have altered ECM architectures that influence local matrix stiffness 28 and FAK overexpression correlates with more aggressive and invasive human breast carcinomas. 9 As such, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the increased stiffness associated with breast adenomas and carcinomas 29,30 and increased matrix stiffness from increased collagen density and alignment is conducive to FAK activation, and that this in turn promotes invasive tumor cell behavior. Furthermore, additional alterations to the ECM (change in composition, crosslinking etc.,) that increase matrix stiffness, or activation of oncogenes that increase cellular contractility, which can promote integrin-clustering and/or matrix re-organization to produce a stiffer microenvironment, could lead to aberrant hyperactivation of FAK.…”

Viscoelastic Imaging of Breast Tumor Microenvironment With Ultrasound

“…US provides information with little or no risk to the subjects, at relatively low cost compared with other modalities, and with high temporal resolution to observe dynamic processes. Viscoelastic imaging of breast tumors aims to observe the effects of molecular signaling and cell metabolism by exploiting the large natural contrast in mechanical material properties that exists between cancerous and noncancerous soft tissues (10,11).…”

Non-Invasive Assessment of Liver Fibrosis by Vibration-Controlled Transient Elastography (Fibroscan®)

“…The compression modulus λ is several Giga Pascal; it is thus very large compared to the shear modulus of soft biological tissues (several kilo Pascal) (Sarvazyan et al 1995). With λ >> µ, it yields that υ ≈ 0.5 which is characteristic of a quasi-incompressible medium.…”