Abstract
Quantitative measures of cartilage morphology (i.e., thickness) represent potentially powerful surrogate endpoints in osteoarthritis (OA). These can be used to identify risk factors of structural disease progression and can facilitate the clinical efficacy testing of structure modifying drugs in OA. This paper focuses on quantitative imaging of articular cartilage morphology in the knee, and will specifically deal with different cartilage morphology outcome variables and regions of interest, the relative performance and relationship between cartilage morphology measures, reference values for MRI-based knee cartilage morphometry, imaging protocols for measurement of cartilage morphology (including those used in the Osteoarthritis Initiative), sensitivity to change observed in knee OA, spatial patterns of cartilage loss as derived by subregional analysis, comparison of MRI changes with radiographic changes, risk factors of MRI-based cartilage loss in knee OA, the correlation of MRI-based cartilage loss with clinical outcomes, treatment response in knee OA, and future directions of the field.
Highlights
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has revolutionized the field of clinical research in osteoarthritis (OA) because it can directly visualize all diarthrodial tissues, including cartilage, bone, menisci, ligaments, synovium, and others
This paper focuses on quantitative imaging of articular cartilage morphology in the knee, and will deal with different cartilage morphology outcome variables and regions of interest, the relative performance and relationship between cartilage morphology measures, reference values for MRI-based knee cartilage morphometry, imaging protocols for measurement of cartilage morphology, sensitivity to change observed in knee OA, spatial patterns of cartilage loss as derived by subregional analysis, comparison of MRI changes with radiographic changes, risk factors of MRI-based cartilage loss in knee OA, the correlation of MRI-based cartilage loss with clinical outcomes, treatment response in knee OA, and future directions of the field
Quantitative measurements of cartilage morphology fully exploit the 3D nature of MRI data sets [1, 2]; their strength is that they are less observerdependent and more objective than scoring methods, and that relatively small changes in cartilage thickness, which occur relatively homogeneously over larger areas may be detected over time, which are not apparent to the naked eye
Summary
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has revolutionized the field of clinical research in osteoarthritis (OA) because it can directly visualize all diarthrodial tissues, including cartilage, bone, menisci, ligaments, synovium, and others. Quantitative measurements of cartilage morphology (structure) fully exploit the 3D nature of MRI data sets [1, 2]; their strength is that they are less observerdependent and more objective than scoring methods, and that relatively small changes in cartilage thickness, which occur relatively homogeneously over larger areas may be detected over time, which are not apparent to the naked eye This is important, as the progression of structural changes in OA has generally been shown to be slow, both when being evaluated by radiography [4,5,6] and MRI [6,7,8,9,10].
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