MRI in the Assessment of Synovium and Cartilage

A PRINCIPAL obstacle to the study of arthritis and the development of well-designed treatment protocols has been the lack of reliable clinical, laboratory or radiographic methods for monitoring disease progression and therapeutic response. Radiography has been the mainstay of imaging evaluation of arthritis. However, although refinements such as microfocal magnification, film digitization and computerized analysis have greatly advanced its capabilities [1, 2], radiography remains fundamentally limited in the type of information it can provide. Although it can detail osseous changes in patients with arthritis, radiography cannot directly examine the articular cartilage, synovial tissue and other important non-calcified structures in the joint. As such, it provides only a limited view of the complex disease process involveain arthritis.