medical

Noninvasive measurement of local stress inside soft materials with programmed shear waves

Mechanical stresses across different length scales play a fundamental role in understanding biological systems' functions and engineering soft machines and devices. However, it is challenging to noninvasively probe local mechanical stresses in situ, particularly when the mechanical properties are unknown. We propose an acoustoelastic imaging-based method to infer the local stresses in soft materials by measuring the speeds of shear waves induced by custom-programmed acoustic radiation force.