Association between knee cartilage thickness determined by magnetic resonance imaging three-dimensional analysis and the International Cartilage Repair Society (ICRS) arthroscopic grade

Background: The purpose of this study was to retrospectively investigate whether the aver-age cartilage thickness calculated by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) three-dimensional (3D) analysis system was correlated with the International Cartilage Repair Society (ICRS) grade at each subregion, as a representative scoring for arthroscopic evaluation.Methods: The subjects were 102 patients who underwent arthroscopy for meniscus repair or high tibial osteotomy for medial osteoarthritis of the knee. Cartilage lesions were arthro-scopically quantified according to the ICRS grade at each subregion. Fluoroscopy was used to compare the subregions on arthroscopic evaluation with subregions on MRI. The average cartilage thickness at each subregion was also automatically calculated from MRI data using our 3D analysis system. The association between ICRS grade and the average carti-lage thickness at 18 subregions in the medial femoral and medial tibial regions was eval-uated using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.Results: Examination of the fluoroscopic images revealed that the posterior subregions in the medial femoral region did not match the position between arthroscopy and MRI; there-fore, those three subregions were excluded. In the medial femoral region, the ICRS grade correlated moderately with cartilage thickness at five subregions and weakly at one subre-gion. In the medial tibial region, the ICRS grade correlated moderately with cartilage thick-ness at four subregions and weakly at one subregion, but it did not correlate at the other four subregions.Conclusion: The average cartilage thickness determined by MRI 3D analysis correlated with arthroscopic grade at 11 of 15 subregions in the medial femoral and tibial regions.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).