Medical physics graduate student publishes paper about cartilage

Student research flourishes at Oakland University. For example, Biomedical Sciences: Medical Physics graduate student Daniel Mittelstaedt was the lead author on a study published in the December issue of the journal Connective Tissue Research (“Quantitative Determination of Morphological and Territorial Structures of Articular Cartilage from Both Perpendicular and Parallel Sections by Polarized Light Microscopy,” Volume 52, Pages 512-522, 2011). Former OU undergraduate medical physics major Alex Shmelyov is a coauthor. The research was carried out in the laboratory of Professor and CBR member Yang Xia, in the Department of Physics, and was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. The paper describes a new method to use polarized light microscopy to student the structure of cartilage, and concludes that “this orthogonal imaging technique could provide a better understanding of the three-dimensional territorial and interterritorial fibrils in articular cartilage, the disturbance of which could signify the onset of degenerative cartilage diseases such as osteoarthritis.”