The solid and fluid pressures of tumours are often elevated relative to surrounding tissue. This increased pressure is known to correlate with decreased treatment efficacy and potentially with tumour aggressiveness and therefore, accurate noninvasive estimates of tumour pressure would be of great value. We present a proof-of-concept method to infer the total tumour pressure, that is the sum of the fluid and solid parts, by examining stiffness in the peritumoural tissue with MR elastography and utilising nonlinear biomechanical models. The pressure from the tumour deforms the surrounding tissue leading to changes in stiffness. Understanding and accounting for these biases in stiffness has the potential to enable estimation of total tumour pressure. Simulations are used to validate the method with varying pressure levels, tumour shape, tumour size, and noise levels. Results show excellent matching in low noise cases and still correlate well with higher noise. Percent error remains near or below 10% for higher pressures in all noise level cases. Reconstructed pressures were also calculated from experiments with a catheter balloon embedded in a plastisol phantom at multiple inflation levels. Here the reconstructed pressures generally match the increases in pressure measured during the experiments. Percent errors between average reconstructed and measured pressures at four inflation states are 17.9%, 52%, 23.2%, and 0.9%. Future work will apply this method to in vivo data, potentially providing an important biomarker for cancer diagnosis and treatment.

肿瘤的固体压力和液体压力通常相对于周围组织升高。众所周知，这种增加的压力与治疗效果下降以及潜在的肿瘤侵袭性相关，因此，肿瘤压力的准确无创估计将具有很大的价值。我们提出了一种概念验证方法，通过使用 MR 弹性成像检查肿瘤周围组织的硬度并利用非线性生物力学模型来推断总肿瘤压力，即流体和固体部分的总和。来自肿瘤的压力使周围组织变形，导致硬度变化。了解和解释这些硬度偏差有可能能够估计肿瘤总压力。模拟用于验证具有不同压力水平、肿瘤形状、肿瘤大小和噪声水平的方法。结果显示，在低噪声情况下具有出色的匹配性，并且与较高噪声情况仍具有良好的相关性。在所有噪声水平情况下，对于较高压力，百分比误差保持在接近或低于 10%。还通过在多个充气水平下将导管球囊嵌入塑料溶胶模型中的实验来计算重建压力。这里重建的压力通常与实验期间测量的压力增加相匹配。四种通货膨胀状态下的平均重建压力和测量压力之间的百分比误差分别为 17.9%、52%、23.2% 和 0.9%。未来的工作将将该方法应用于体内数据，有可能为癌症诊断和治疗提供重要的生物标志物。