Project Details
Projekt
Functionality Assessment of Human Articular Cartilage by Image-Driven Computational Mechanics and Advanced MRI
Subject Area
Mechanics
Radiology
Radiology
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517243167
Cartilage degeneration is the hallmark change defining osteoarthritis (OA), a widespread disease with huge socioeconomic impact. In the US around 30 million persons suffer from OA with an aggregated healthcare cost well above US$ 300 billion per year. At an early stage, preventive actions can often delay or even stop further degeneration. Unfortunately, early stage OA can be detected so far only by methods that are at least to some extent invasive. There is thus a pressing need for new methods that can detect OA non-invasively already at an early stage so that therapeutical measures can be taken before OA has resulted in substantial and irreversible damage. In this project we aim at developing such a method, which can detect early stage OA non-invasively from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Our method exploits the observation that early stage OA is indicated by changes of the mechanical properties of articular cartilage. We will develop a computational model that can determine changes of mechanical properties from MRI data only. To this end, we will harvest a large number of both healthy and pathological cartilage samples during clinical surgeries and examine them by most recent methods of quantitative MRI (qMRI), biomechanical analysis, histological analysis and compositional analysis. The resulting data will form the input for an advanced computational framework combining computational biomechanics and machine learning. This framework will be able to determine the mechanical properties of articular cartilage non-invasively from MRI data, providing thereby a promising basis for future non-invasive diagnosis of early stage OA.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Finland
Co-Investigator
Professor Dr.-Ing. Christian Johannes Cyron
Cooperation Partner
Dr. Lassi Rieppo
