DEVELOPMENT OF IMAGING BIOMARKERS FOR KNEE OSTEOARTHRITIS; RADIOGRAPHS, DXA AND MRI ACTIVE SHAPE AND APPEARANCE MODELS.

This project aims to find better ways to look at osteoarthritis by looking at the shape and appearance of the knee joint. The shape of the joint tells us a lot about its health; Osteoarthritis makes joints flattened and deformed, which causes pain when people put weight on them, but certain shapes may reflect early signs of osteoarthritis, or be a sign that someone is at risk of getting osteoarthritis in the future. However it is difficult to fully describe the shape of complicated structures, such as a knee joint using a few lengths, widths and angles. To build a computer model of the shape and appearance of the knee, we will use image analysis techniques used in other applications such as face recognition. Currently, the only effective treatment for osteoarthritis is joint replacement. There are no effective drugs available, other than for pain relief. Unfortunately, because osteoarthritis is a complicated disease that is hard to identify in its early stages and often progresses quite slowly from year to year, running drug trials is often considered too expensive and time consuming by pharmaceutical companies. We hope to find that the shape and appearance of the knee can be used to measure smaller changes in disease severity than currently possible and whether it could be used to identify a ?high-risk? group of patients, so that drug trials would become more economical to run. We will compare two and three dimensional models of the knee and use different types of medical image to build the model, including MRI scans and x-rays. Each method has different advantages and disadvantages so by comparing all three we hope to find the best way to model the osteoarthritic knee.