Graduate student Ji Hyun Lee publishes imaging paper

“Although these imaging techniques [micro magnetic resonance imaging, μMRI; polarized light microscopy, PLM; Fourier transform infrared imaging, FTIRI] had been used individually to study articular cartilage, the quantitative correlations among all three techniques had never been simultaneously established based on the same tissue. As these imaging tools are based on different physical mechanisms (the motional anisotropy of protons in μMRI, the optical birefringence in PLM, and the vibrational anisotropy of amide absorption in FTIRI), these imaging techniques are complementary to each other. It would be useful to establish the simultaneous correlations among them in articular cartilage at microscopic resolution. As it would be impractical to routinely use all imaging techniques together in any project, the establishment of these multidisciplinary correlations could be used to suggest the potential implications when only one technique is being used. These were the motivations of this comprehensive imaging project. The specific aims of this study were to quantify the zonal boundaries of articular cartilage and to correlate the subtissue zones simultaneously among these three imaging techniques. The accurate definition of these subtissue zones would be an important step toward the understanding of the structural properties of this load-bearing tissue and the loss of load-bearing ability of cartilage in common disease such as osteoarthritis."