Abstract
With the development of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, it is much desired to establish bioimaging techniques to monitor the real-time regeneration efficacy in vivo in a non-invasive way. Herein, we tried magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to evaluate knee cartilage regeneration after implanting a biomaterial scaffold seeded with chondrocytes, namely, matrix-induced autologous chondrocyte implantation (MACI). After summary of the T2 mapping and the T1-related delayed gadolinium-enhanced MRI imaging of cartilage (dGEMRIC) in vitro and in vivo in the literature, these two MRI techniques were tried clinically. In this study, 18 patients were followed up for 1 year. It was found that there was a significant difference between the regeneration site and the neighboring normal site (control), and the difference gradually diminished with regeneration time up to 1 year according to both the quantitative T1 and T2 MRI methods. We further established the correlation between the quantitative evaluation of MRI and the clinical Lysholm scores for the first time. Hence, the MRI technique was confirmed to be a feasible semi-quantitative yet non-invasive way to evaluate the in vivo regeneration of knee articular cartilage.
Highlights
Molecular imaging or bioimaging is aimed mainly at the application of imaging techniques to monitor biological processes at the cellular and molecular levels for the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of living bodies [1]
An organized collagen network is formed along with articular cartilage regeneration, which is the basis for histological characterization of hyaline cartilage over time in this study
The surgical area was well observed in the brighter ROI area, which is in contrast to the surrounding normal cartilage area, especially at 3 and 6 months after matrix-induced autologous chondrocyte implantation (MACI)
Summary
Molecular imaging or bioimaging is aimed mainly at the application of imaging techniques to monitor biological processes at the cellular and molecular levels for the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of living bodies [1]. This concept represents an important step forward in the assessment of abnormalities by medical imaging in vivo, linking clinical. MRI has been regarded to be an important method in the fundamental research and evaluation of cartilage injury regeneration [2,3,4]. The paper is presented starting from the introduction of the MRI principle and the summary of the valuable in vitro and in vivo MRI observations in the literature
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