Effect of ligation on the viscoelastic properties of liver tissues

It has been reported that ex vivo viscoelastic properties of liver tissues usually differ from those measured in in vivo state due to the reasons such as the effects of perfusion, temperature, and native pre-stress. Therefore, the development of an appropriate ex vivo protocol, which enables the measurement of liver mechanical properties close to those in vivo, is of great importance and has been pursued over the years. In this paper, we propose a simple protocol by ligating the liver when performing ex vivo indentation relaxation tests. Our results show that the viscoelastic kernel function, which measures the intrinsic time-dependent mechanical behavior of a viscoelastic material, determined with the present protocol can describe the in vivo viscoelasticity of liver tissues well in comparison with the ex vivo result measured on a liver without ligation and that obtained in vitro. The performance of the protocol reported here is similar to the ex vivo perfusion system developed by Kerdok et al. (2006). However, the present experimental set-up is much easier to realize.