A single-sided NMR approach to study structural differences of the articular cartilage tissue

In the last decade, few preliminary low-field relaxometry studies were conducted on the articular cartilage using the single-sided NMR-MOUSE device that can be useful for osteoarthritis characterization. This study aims to develop a procedure capable of quantitatively evaluating the structure of the three cartilage layers. Forty osteochondral cylindrical bovine knee specimens were analyzed obtaining four NMR parameters T1, T2, D, and α (extracted from a Double-Quantum-like sequence for solid/liquid estimation) for each cartilage layer. Significant discrimination of the three layers was found by all the parameters, making the NMR dataset sensitive to structural differences and changes due to cartilage diseases.