Detection of Early Knee Osteoarthritis Using Multi-Component T1ρ Mapping.

BACKGROUND Early detection of knee osteoarthritis (OA) is important. Spin-lattice relaxation in the rotating frame (T1ρ) mapping is sensitive to early cartilage changes, but the mono-exponential (ME) model may be limited. Multi-component models can capture more tissue complexity, but their diagnostic advantage has not been validated. PURPOSE To evaluate if stretched- (SE) and bi-exponential (BE) T1ρ models can improve early knee OA detection over the ME model. STUDY TYPE Case-control study. POPULATION Twenty-six healthy subjects (mean age 51.5) and 26 early knee OA patients (mean age 61.8). FIELD STRENGTH/SEQUENCE T1ρ-prepared Turbo FLASH sequence at 3 T field strength. ASSESSMENT T1ρ parameters from three exponential models were adjusted for age. To maximize group separability, the parameters were combined into single discriminators for both global knee cartilage and six anatomical sub-regions. Diagnostic performance was assessed based on the ability of these combined models to distinguish early OA. STATISTICAL TESTS Parameters were adjusted for age. Mann-Whitney U-test (group comparisons), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) with bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals (CI). Significance level set at p < 0.05, using the false discovery rate (FDR) to correct for multiple comparisons. RESULTS In the global analysis, no model demonstrated significant diagnostic performance (p-values of 0.63, 0.96, 0.63 for ME, SE, and BE). Multi-regional SE model (AUC = 0.83, CI: 0.72, 0.93) significantly distinguished OA and healthy groups. Calibration analysis showed the SE model had the lowest Brier score (0.17), significantly better than the ME model (0.26). DATA CONCLUSION Sub-regional analysis of T1ρ parameter maps suggests an improvement in diagnostic performance for early knee OA compared to globally averaged measurements. The stretched-exponential model showed the most promise. However, small sample size and wide confidence intervals highlight the need for further validation with a larger cohort before clinical utility claims can be made. EVIDENCE LEVEL 4. TECHNICAL EFFICACY Stage 2.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging

• Publication date

  2025-12-31

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/jmri.70224PMID 41473939PMCID PMC12910345
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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