Ergonomic Flexible Drivers for Hepatic MR Elastography

Jun Chen¹, David Stanley², Kevin Glaser¹, Meng Yin¹, Phillip Rossman¹, richard Ehman¹

Electromechanical drivers and pneumatic drivers are widely used for in vivo human hepatic MRE. Due to the small size and rigid nature of existing mechanical drivers, the human-driver contact is not able to accommodate the soft and contoured nature of the human body, therefore the mechanical coupling is not optimal and has the potential of causing discomfort to patients. The pneumatic driver system has the same limitations due to it current rigid passive driver, especially for female patients. Our goals were 1) to design an ergonomic pneumatic flexible passive driver to improve human-driver mechanical coupling and patient comfort; and 2) to compare the flexible driver with the rigid passive driver on volunteers and patients.