Assessment of myocardial viscoelasticity with Brillouin spectroscopy in myocardial infarction and aortic stenosis models.

Heart diseases are associated with changes in the biomechanical properties of the myocardial wall. However, there is no modality available to assess myocardial stiffness directly. Brillouin microspectroscopy (mBS) is a consolidated mechanical characterization technique, applied to the study of the viscoelastic and elastic behavior of biological samples and may be a valuable tool for assessing the viscoelastic properties of the cardiac tissue.

Brillouin Spectroscopy: From Biomedical Research to New Generation Pathology Diagnosis.

Brillouin spectroscopy has recently gained considerable interest within the biomedical field as an innovative tool to study mechanical properties in biology. The Brillouin effect is based on the inelastic scattering of photons caused by their interaction with thermodynamically driven acoustic modes or phonons and it is highly dependent on the material's elasticity. Therefore, Brillouin is a contactless, label-free optic approach to elastic and viscoelastic analysis that has enabled unprecedented analysis of ex vivo and in vivo mechanical behavior of several tissues with a micrometric resolution, paving the way to a promising future in clinical diagnosis.