MRI Analysis of Femoral Cartilage Thickness in Early Osteoarthritis Knee Patients for Uni-Condylar Knee Potential Available to Purchase

Over the past several decades, Magnetic Resonance Imagining has become a standard in cartilage thickness analysis (Gray 2008, Potter 2006). However, MRI analysis has not been used to indicate patients with early osteoarthritic (OA) cartilage changes for early intervention procedures (EIP) such as grafts or minimally-invasive unicondylar knee replacements. The objective of this study is to examine the viability of using MRI to identify early osteoarthritis of articular cartilage and identify the affected areas in a clinical setting. Based on the results of studies previously conducted in this lab, along with the fact that the majority of axial loading in the knee occurs during the impact phase of walking, we expect to find the majority of lesions to be localized to the distal femur, with the posterior condyles remaining largely intact.