MRI techniques in early stages of cartilage disease

Cartilage degenerative diseases affect minions of people. Our understanding of these diseases and our ability to establish efficacious treatment strat egies have been confounded by the difficulty of nondestructively evaluating the state of cartilage. Imaging strategies that allow visualization of car tilage integrity would revolutionize the field by allowing us to visualize early stages of degeneration and thus to evaluate predisposing factors for cartilage disease and changes resulting from interventions (eg, therapies) in culture studies, tissue-engineered systems, animal models, and in vivo i n humans. Here we briefly review current state-of-the-art MRI strategies re levant to understanding and following treatment in early cartilage degenera tion. We review MRI as applied to the assessment of the whole joint, of car tilage as a whole (as an organ), of cartilage tissue, and of cartilage mole cular composition and structure, Each of these levels is amenable to assess ment by MRI and offers different information that, in the long run, will se rve as an important element of cartilage imaging.