T1rho MR imaging for the evaluation of the denaturelizatoin of articular cartilage caused by osteoarthritis

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T1rho mapping is one of the quantitative MR imaging techniques for the assessment of articular cartilage, because it can quantitatively evaluate the contents of extracellular matrices, such as collagen and proteoglycan (PG), in the cartilage. At the early stage of osteoarthritis (OA), PG depletion occurs prior to the decrease in collagen. It is presumed that T1rho mapping is sensitive enough to detect PG depletion at the early stage of OA. Therefore, we evaluated the clinical utility of T1rho mapping as a diagnostic tool in patients with OA by comparing with T2 mapping which is widely used in clinical practice. We compared T1rho and T2 mappings for their ability to differentiate between normal and denatured articular cartilage by means of radiological-histological correlation. We concluded that T1rho mapping is superior to T2 mapping for the evaluation of denatured articular cartilage with osteoarthritis of the knee.