MR elastography is well established for measuring the mechanical properties of soft tissues in a broad range of clinical populations. However, unlike liver tissue, which is generally considered to be isotropic, muscle is significantly anisotropic, with stiffer mechanical behaviour along the muscle fibre directions. Identifying anisotropic properties is challenging due to the need to track fibre directions and additional numerical difficulties in estimating properties. Here, we describe a novel finite element inversion method for estimating anisotropic mechanical properties of ex vivo tissue data, and validate this method using three sets of simulated data.
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