The liver harvested from a donor must be preserved and transported to a suitable recipient immediately for a successful liver transplantation. In this process, the preservation period is the most critical, since it is the longest and most tissue damage occurs during this period due to the reduced blood supply to the harvested liver and the change in its temperature. We investigate the effect of preservation period on the dynamic material properties of bovine liver using a viscoelastic model derived from both impact and ramp and hold experiments. First, we measure the storage and loss moduli of bovine liver as a function of excitation frequency using an impact hammer. Second, its time-dependent relaxation modulus is measured separately through ramp and hold experiments performed by a compression device. Third, a Maxwell solid model that successfully imitates the frequency- and time-dependent dynamic responses of bovine liver is developed to estimate the optimum viscoelastic material coefficients by minimizing the error between the experimental data and the corresponding values generated by the model. Finally, the variation in the viscoelastic material coefficients of bovine liver are investigated as a function of preservation period for the liver samples tested 1 h, 2 h, 4 h, 8 h, 12 h, 24 h, 36 h, and 48 h after harvesting. The results of our experiments performed with three animals show that the liver tissue becomes stiffer and more viscous as it spends more time in the preservation cycle.

The current methods for characterization of frequency-dependent material properties of human liver are very limited. In fact, there is almost no data available in the literature showing the variation in dynamic elastic modulus of healthy or diseased human liver as a function of excitation frequency. We show that frequency-dependent dynamic material properties of a whole human liver can be easily and efficiently characterized by an impact hammer. The procedure only involves a light impact force applied to the tested liver by a hand-held hammer. The results of our experiments conducted with 15 human livers harvested from the patients having some form of liver disease show that the proposed approach can successfully differentiate the level of fibrosis in human liver. We found that the storage moduli of the livers having no fibrosis (F0) and that of the cirrhotic livers (F4) varied from 10 to 20 kPa and 20 to 50 kPa for the frequency range of 0-80 Hz, respectively.