Abstract
Osteoarthritis is a common joint disease affecting a large population especially the elderly where cartilage degeneration is one of its hallmark symptoms. There is a need to develop new devices and instruments for the early detection and treatment of cartilage degeneration. In this study, we describe the development of a miniaturized water-jet ultrasound indentation probe for this purpose. To evaluate the system, we applied it to characterize the degeneration of articular cartilage with the measurement of its morphologic, acoustic, and mechanical properties, using the enzymatic digestions of cartilage as a model of OA. Fifty cartilage samples were tested with 10 of them used for the reproducibility study and the other 40 for collagenase and trypsin digestions. Thickness, integrated reflection coefficient (IRC), effective stiffness, and energy dissipation ratio (EDR) were used to quantify the change of articular cartilage before and after degeneration. The measurement reproducibility as represented by the standardized coefficient of variation (SCV) was 2.6%, 10.2%, 11.5%, and 12.8% for thickness, IRC, stiffness, and EDR, respectively. A significant change of IRC, stiffness, and EDR was detected after degeneration by the designed probe (p < 0.05). There was also a significant difference of IRC, stiffness, and EDR between trypsin and collagenase digestions (p < 0.001). In conclusion, a miniaturized water-jet ultrasound indentation probe has been designed, which has been successfully used to detect and differentiate cartilage degeneration simulated by enzymatic digestions. This probe, with future development, can be potentially suitable for quantitative assessment of cartilage degeneration with an arthroscopic operation.
Highlights
Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common joint disease, which is prevalent in old populations [1, 2]
The measurement standardized coefficient of variation (SCV) of the four parameters obtained from the miniaturized probe was 2.6% for thickness, 10.2% for integrated reflection coefficient (IRC), 11.5% for stiffness, and 12.8%
The results showed that the current probe can be used to discriminate the degenerations of articular cartilage induced by different enzymes
Summary
Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common joint disease, which is prevalent in old populations [1, 2]. Treatment of OA causes a big economic burden to the society [3] and it is worth a great effort to find a cost-effective management strategy for this disease [4]. Cartilage is one of the hallmark tissues degraded in OA which are normally detected by clinical symptoms such as limited joint movement and a significantly narrowed joint space as seen in X-radiography. Significant joint space narrowing is normally a sign of very late stage of articular cartilage degeneration [6], for which currently no effective treatment exists. It is necessary to develop more sensitive methods, using facilities such as MRI [7] or ultrasound [8] to detect the early degradation of this tissue, when the disease is still reversible and treatment using disease-modifying OA drugs may be more effective [9]
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