Acoustic Force Elastography Microscopy

Hydrogel scaffolds have attracted attention to develop cellular therapy and tissue engineering platforms for regenerative medicine applications. Among factors, local mechanical properties of scaffolds drive the functionalities of cell niche. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), the standard method to characterize mechanical properties of hydrogels, restricts development in tissue engineering because the measurement provides a single elasticity value for the sample, requires direct contact, and represents a destructive evaluation preventing longitudinal studies on the same sample. We propose a novel technique, acoustic force elastography microscopy (AFEM), to evaluate elastic properties of tissue engineering scaffolds.