Assessing Mouse Brain Elasticity Using Air-Pulse Based Optical Coherence Elastography

Current diagnostic methods are able to detect severe brain trauma but are unable to detect the microscopic brain injuries that regularly occur during a concussion. Our research aims to explore a potential alternative method to detect a wider range of severity in concussions through comparing the changes in the biomechanical properties of pre- and post-concussed brain tissue using optical coherence elastography (OCE). This study is a proof of concept to see if OCE can distinguish different regions within the brain based on biomechanical properties. In this study, we hope to distinguish the hippocampus, a complex structure located in the medial temporal part of the brain beneath the cerebral cortex, from the rest of the brain. Our results show that the hippocampus is softer than the cortex of the brain, which corresponds to currently available literature. In this study, we were able to show that OCE could detect differences in the biomechanical properties of different regions of the brain.