Quantitative 3D imaging parameters improve prediction of hip osteoarthritis outcome
Publication: Scientific Reports
T. D. Turmezei, G. M. Treece, A. H. Gee, S. Sigurdsson, H. Jonsson, T. Aspelund, V. Gudnason & K. E. S. Poole
March 2020
Summary
Hip osteoarthritis is a very common condition that will affect up to 25% of the population in their lifetime. There is no cure for this painful and debilitating disease, with the mainstay of treatment currently being surgical replacement of the joint once it has become too stiff or painful to use. Research trials trying to find effective therapies for osteoarthritis currently rely on x-ray radiograph imaging to test if there have been any meaningful changes in the structure of the joint for a new therapy, but this method suffers from being unable to detect small changes reliably and from only being able to see the joint in 2D.
We developed the joint space mapping (JSM) technique in a collaboration between the Departments of Medicine and Engineering at the University of Cambridge and have since taken it to test on patient data from the widely regarded AGES-Reykjavik patient cohort of healthy older Icelandic adults.
Our research showed that JSM can identify structurally relevant disease features related to the important outcome of joint replacement in hip osteoarthritis better than the current clinical trial 2D imaging gold standards. This means that JSM could be a significantly better way of identifying who might be at high risk from getting hip osteoarthritis, those in whom the disease might be progressing rapidly, and whether any new therapy is effective at stopping the joint destruction that ultimately leads to joint failure. These results have been achieved by using an existing and readily available clinical imaging technique to look at the hip joint in 3D.
