Musculoskeletal Research

Peter Hardy, PhD, Associate Professor of Radiology and Division of Medical Physics is interested in developing tools based on Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging to study a variety of diseases. In one project, funded by the Arthritis Foundation he is working with collaborators at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and elsewhere to study using T1rho imaging to assess the degeneration of articular cartilage. The group has tested the reproducibility of T1rho both on the same machine and from scanner to scanner. Once the acquisition techniques were aligned to be consistent, the reproducibility of the measurement was quite high. Shown here are single slice MR images of the knee showing the articular cartilage on the femur and tibia acquired with a thin slice DESS technique and also a T1rho image of the same location.