Magnetic resonance imaging of the zone of calcified cartilage in the knee joint using 3-dimensional ultrashort echo time cones sequences

Chinese Medical Journal
Jin LiuYing-Hua Zhao

Abstract

The zone of calcified cartilage (ZCC) plays an important role in the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis (OA) but has never been imaged in vivo with magnetic resonance (MR) imaging techniques. We investigated the feasibility of direct imaging of the ZCC in both cadaveric whole knee specimens and in vivo healthy knees using a 3-dimensional ultrashort echo time cones (3D UTE-Cones) sequence on a clinical 3T scanner. In all, 12 cadaveric knee joints and 10 in vivo healthy were collected. At a 3T MR scanner with an 8-channel knee coil, a fat-saturated 3D dual-echo UTE-Cones sequence was used to image the ZCC, following with a short rectangular pulse excitation and 3D spiral sampling with conical view ordering. The regions of interests (ROIs) were delineated by a blinded observer. Single-component T2* and T2 values were calculated from fat-saturated 3D dual-echo UTE-Cones and a Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (T2 CPMG) data using a semi-automated MATLAB code. The single-exponential fitting curve of ZCC was accurately obtained with R2 of 0.989. For keen joint samples, the ZCC has a short T2* ranging from 0.62 to 2.55 ms, with the mean ± standard deviation (SD) of 1.49 ± 0.66 ms, and with 95% confidence intervals (CI) of 1.20-1.78 ms. For volunt...Continue Reading

Methods Mentioned

BETA
light microscopy

Software Mentioned

ZCC
MATLAB

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