Researchers at Lund University and Harvard Medical School have developed a method of detecting the early stages of osteoarthritis using an MRI scanner -- while still in its early stages, the goal is that soon this technology will be available for doctors to treat patients.
"Osteoarthritis often attacks the knee and hip joints and breaks down the impact absorbing cartilage found there. For those affected, the progression of the disease usually takes many years, with gradually increasing pain which often leads to disability," Carl Siversson, of Lund University told ScienceDaily.
The new method, using an MRI scanner, is called dGEMRIC (delayed gadolinium-enhanced MRI of cartilage).
"This was major progress, but one problem was that the measurements could only be performed in a limited part of the cartilage. We have now improved the method so that we can study all the cartilage in the joint at once. We have achieved this by solving the problem of how to correct all the irregularities in the MRI images," Silversson continued.
