Congratulations are due to Dr James MacKay of the University of Cambridge and the University of East Anglia, who recently won the 2021 ISMRM Young Investigator Award for their paper, “Three-Dimensional Surface-Based Analysis of Cartilage MRI Data in Knee Osteoarthritis: Validation and Initial Clinical Application“. This is a highly prestigious award to only one investigator at the largest MRI conference with nearly 6,000 attendees.
Dr Josh Kaggie, STARSTEM researcher and MRI physicist, was the second author on the abstract and has collaborated with MacKay for many years. The abstract tackles the clinical application of a semiautomated surface-based method for analyzing cartilage relaxation times (“composition”) and morphology on MRI:
Conventional MRI outcome measures for cartilage in knee osteoarthritis (OA) clinical studies lack responsiveness and require time-consuming manual analysis. Here we validate and clinically implement a semiautomatic surface-based approach termed 3D Cartilage Surface Mapping (3D-CaSM) which overcomes these issues. Validation data demonstrate comparable bias, precision, repeatability and reproducibility to expert manual segmentation (current standard) but with >10 fold reduction in analysis time. Clinical data indicate improved sensitivity to change in one observational and two interventional (exercise, knee joint distraction) studies.
Read the full open-access paper in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging.