Magnetic resonance elastography: A review

Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is a rapidly developing technology for quantitatively assessing the mechanical properties of tissue. The technology can be considered to be an imaging-based counterpart to palpation, commonly used by physicians to diagnose and characterize diseases. The success of palpation as a diagnostic method is based on the fact that the mechanical properties of tissues are often dramatically affected by the presence of disease processes, such as cancer, inflammation, and fibrosis. MRE obtains information about the stiffness of tissue by assessing the propagation of mechanical waves through the tissue with a special magnetic resonance imaging technique. The technique essentially…