Mapping the strain-stiffening behavior of the lung and lung cancer at microscale resolution using the crystal ribcage

Lung diseases such as cancer substantially alter the mechanical properties of the organ with direct impact on the development, progression, diagnosis, and treatment response of diseases. Despite significant interest in the lung's material properties, measuring the stiffness of intact lungs at sub-alveolar resolution has not been possible. Recently, we developed the crystal ribcage to image functioning lungs at optical resolution while controlling physiological parameters such as air pressure. Here, we introduce a data-driven, multiscale network model that takes images of the lung at different distending pressures, acquired via the crystal ribcage, and produces corresponding absolute stiffness maps. Following validation, we report absolute stiffness maps of the functioning lung at microscale resolution in health and disease. For representative images of a healthy lung and a lung with primary cancer, we find that while the lung exhibits significant stiffness heterogeneity at the microscale, primary tumors introduce even greater heterogeneity into the lung's microenvironment. Additionally, we observe that while the healthy alveoli exhibit strain-stiffening of ∼1.75 times, the tumor's stiffness increases by a factor of six across the range of measured transpulmonary pressures. While the tumor stiffness is 1.4 times the lung stiffness at a transpulmonary pressure of three cmH₂O, the tumor's mean stiffness is nearly five times greater than that of the surrounding tissue at a transpulmonary pressure of 18 cmH₂O. Finally, we report that the variance in both strain and stiffness increases with transpulmonary pressure in both the healthy and cancerous lungs. Our new method allows quantitative assessment of disease-induced stiffness changes in the alveoli with implications for mechanotransduction.