Although rigid body motion of connective and orthopaedic tissues, e.g. Additionally, biomechanics of tissues, elucidated by noninvasive imaging, can serve as a unique biomarker for disease monitoring and tissue engineering 3 and a critical source for in vivo experimental data in the validation of constitutive relationships 4.ĭespite the importance of mechanical function to the physiology of connective tissues, the visualization of the in situ mechanical behavior of orthopaedic tissues in particular has been technical challenging 5, 6 and methods for the direct, noninvasive in vivo measurement of internal cartilage mechanics (i.e., strains within the tissue) are completely lacking 7. Especially in tissues with a primarily mechanical function, such as articular cartilage, knowledge of the localized micromechanical environment can lead to a further understanding of mechanobiology and the biomechanical response of healthy and pathologic tissues 1, 2. The living human body poses an exquisite mechanical environment, resulting in complex physical interactions that cannot be fully understood with ex vivo experiments alone. The ability to measure biomechanical quantities in biological systems that are designed to generate, transmit, or receive loads could greatly enhance knowledge and understanding of tissue health, damage, disease and repair. Noninvasive visualization and quantification of in vivo anatomy and physiology has long been a goal of medicine and engineering. Our MRI-based approach may accelerate the development of regenerative therapies for diseased or damaged cartilage, which is currently limited by the lack of reliable in vivo methods for noninvasive assessment of functional changes following treatment. Maximum principle and shear strain measures in the tibia were correlated with body mass index. We found that compression (of 1/2 body weight) applied at the foot produced a sliding, rigid-body displacement at the tibiofemoral cartilage interface, that loading generated subject- and gender-specific and regionally complex patterns of intratissue strains and that dominant cartilage strains (approaching 12%) were in shear. Magnetic resonance imaging acquisitions were synchronized with physiologically relevant compressive loading and used to visualize and measure regional displacement and strain of tibiofemoral articular cartilage in a sagittal plane. Here, we directly quantified for the first time deformation patterns through the thickness of tibiofemoral articular cartilage in healthy human volunteers. Displacements or strain may serve as a functional imaging biomarker for healthy, diseased and repaired tissues, but unfortunately intratissue cartilage deformation in vivo is largely unknown. The in vivo measurement of articular cartilage deformation is essential to understand how mechanical forces distribute throughout the healthy tissue and change over time in the pathologic joint.
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