A novel torsional wave sensor designed to characterize mechanical properties of soft tissues is presented in this work. Elastography is a widely used technique since the 1990s to map tissue stiffness. Moreover, quantitative elastography uses the velocity of shear waves to achieve the shear stiffness. This technique exhibits significant limitations caused by the difficulty of the separation betw...

Peripheral nerves are exposed to mechanical stress during movement. However the in vivo mechanical properties of nerves remain largely unexplored. The primary aim of this study was to characterize the effect of passive dorsiflexion on sciatic nerve shear wave velocity (an index of stiffness) when the knee was in 90° flexion (knee 90°) or extended (knee 180°). The secondary aim was to determine ...

Mechanical properties of tissue are often related to the pathological state of tissue. Therefore, non-invasively measuring tissue stiffness has important clinical applications. With the assumption of isotropy, incompressibility and linearity, the shear modulus of tissue is related to its shear wave propagation speed. Acoustic radiation force from a focused ultrasound beam can be used to generat...

The presence of significant fibrosis is an indicator for liver disease staging and prognosis. The aim of the study was to determine reproducibility of real-time shear wave elastography using a hepatic biopsy as the reference standard to identify patients with chronic liver disease. Forty patients with chronic liver disease and 12 normal subjects received shear wave elastography performed by ski...

Classical dynamic fracture theories predict the surface wave speed to be the limiting speed for propagation of in-plane cracks in homogeneous, linear elastic materials subjected to remote loading. This report presents experimental evidence to the contrary. Intersonic shear-dominated crack growth featuring shear shock waves was observed along weak planes in a brittle polyester resin under far-fi...

Ducted gravity waves are associated with potentially large perturbations in horizontal winds. It may be shown, neglecting friction, that these perturbations are maximized at the surface and minimized at the top of the wave duct, producing perturbation vertical wind shear as well. The magnitude of this shear is maximized in the wave ridge and the wave trough. The perturbation shear may be signif...

Assessing the biomechanical properties of soft tissue provides clinically valuable information to supplement conventional structural imaging. In the previous studies, we introduced a dynamic elastography technique based on phase-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PhS-OCT) to characterize submillimetric structures such as skin layers or ocular tissues. Here, we propose to implement a pulse ...

In this paper we examine the dynamics of unstable critical layers in stratified shear flows. This is done from the framework of the wave interaction theory of shear instabilities, which views instability as arising from the mutual interaction between wave motions that are present in the background shear and density fields. By formulating a simple analytical model of the structure of vorticity w...