Articular Cartilage Injury Repair by Using MRI PDWI and T2 Mapping Techniques: Animal Model

Articular cartilage plays an important role in normal activity and articular burden of body weight. The main components of articular cartilage are water, collagen fibers and proteoglycan. Recently, the clinical diagnosis of osteoarthritis can only provide the thickness of articular cartilage indirectly but no transform information of articular cartilage and they only reflect the degeneration of articular cartilage in middle and late stages. Hence, it is difficult to diagnose osteoarthritis in early stage. The advantages of MRI technique over other imaging modalities are its invasive, non-radioactive technique and as well possess superior soft tissue discrimination. However, routine MRI scanning can only investigate thickness and morphology of articular cartilage. Consequently, it is proposed to use PDWI and T2 mapping technique to evaluate the potential and feasibility on articular cartilage injury repair of New Zealand rabbit in this study. High quality and high resolution images can be obtained in a reasonable time for all experiments in this study. T2 mapping technique offers more and obvious articular cartilage repair information than traditional anatomical imaging technique. Furthermore, it is capable to indicate that although the articular cartilage somewhat has self-repair, but not completely self-repair by the signal intensity differences within T2 map images. It implies that non-cartilage tissue hyperplasia in the self-repair region of articular cartilage. In conclusion, T2 mapping is effective techniques for revealing self-repair scheme in articular cartilage injury.