Michael S. Richards, Ph.D.

Dr. Richards is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Rochester Medical Center. His research is focused on the development, validation and implementation of elasticity imaging, or elastography, for diagnosing vascular diseases. Elastography is a technique to noninvasively image and measure soft tissue deformations and quantify their mechanical properties in vivo. Unlike other imaging techniques, it offers the capability to provide physicians with entirely new diagnostic information (e.g. tissue stiffness) using established medical imaging techniques. From an academic perspective, elastography brings to the field of biomechanics the investigation of in vivo living organs and tissues under physiologically or medically relevant loading conditions. Within this field, many different techniques have been developed to study a variety of tissue types or pathologies. Most elastographic techniques consist of (1) some mechanical perturbation of tissue, (2) monitoring of the tissue deformation with an imaging system, (3) an image motion estimation technique and (4) inference of the mechanical properties from the measured response. In his experience as a researcher in the field, he has worked on the development or improvement of all these aspects of elastography, however the bulk of his contributions have been in using the equations of motion and mechanical models to characterize the mechanical properties of tissue. His current work focusses the study of arterial mechanics and the risk assessment associate with the abdominal aortic aneurysm disease progression.