Coupling between elastic strain and interstitial fluid flow: ramifications for poroelastic imaging.
We study the effects of interstitial fluid flow and interstitial fluid drainage on the spatio-temporal response of soft tissue strain. The motivation stems from the ability to measure in vivo strain distributions in soft tissue via elastography, and the desire to explore the possibility of using such techniques to investigate soft tissue fluid flow. Our study is based upon a mathematical model for soft tissue mechanics from the literature. It is a simple generalization of biphasic theory that includes coupling between the fluid and solid phases of the soft tissue, and crucially, fluid exchange between the interstitium and the local microvasculature. We solve the mathematical equations in two dimensions by the finite element method (FEM). The finite element implementation is validated against an exact analytical solution that is derived in the appendix. Realistic input tissue properties from the literature are used in conjunction with FEM modelling to conduct several computational experiments. The results of these lead to the following conclusions: (i) different hypothetical flow mechanisms lead to different patterns of strain relaxation with time; (ii) representative tissue properties show fluid drainage into the local microvasculature to be the dominant flow-related stress/strain relaxation mechanism; (iii) the relaxation time of strain in solid tumours due to drainage into the microvasculature is on the order of 5-10 s; (iv) under realistic applied pressure magnitudes, the magnitude of the strain relaxation can be as high as approximately 0.4% strain (4000 microstrains), which is well within the range of strains measurable by elastography.