The Characteristic Recovery Time as a Novel, Noninvasive Metric for Assessing In Vivo Cartilage Mechanical Function

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a disease characterized by the degeneration of cartilage tissue, and is a leading cause of disability in the United States. The clinical diagnosis of OA includes the presence of pain and radiographic imaging findings, which typically do not present until advanced stages of the disease when treatment is difficult. Therefore, identifying new methods of OA detection that are sensitive to earlier pathological changes in cartilage, which may be addressed prior to the development of irreversible OA, is critical for improving OA treatment. A potentially promising avenue for developing early detection methods involves measuring the tissue’s in vivo mechanical response to loading, as changes in mechanical function are commonly observed in ex vivo studies of early OA. However, thus far the mechanical function of cartilage has not been widely assessed in vivo. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop a novel methodology that can be used to measure an in vivo mechanical property of cartilage: the characteristic recovery time. Specifically, in this study we quantified the characteristic recovery time of cartilage thickness after exercise in relatively young subjects with asymptomatic cartilage. Additionally, we measured baseline cartilage thickness and T1rho and T2 relaxation times (quantitative MRI) prior to exercise in these subjects to assess whether baseline MRI measures are predictive of the characteristic recovery time, to understand whether or not the characteristic recovery time provides independent information about cartilage’s mechanical state. Our results show that the mean recovery strain response across subjects was well-characterized by an exponential approach with a characteristic time of 25.2 min, similar to literature values of human characteristic times measured ex vivo. Further, we were unable to detect a statistically significant linear relationship between the characteristic recovery time and the baseline metrics measured here (T1rho relaxation time, T2 relaxation time, and cartilage thickness). This might suggest that the characteristic recovery time has the potential to provide additional information about the mechanical state of cartilage not captured by these baseline MRI metrics. Importantly, this study presents a noninvasive methodology for quantifying the characteristic recovery time, an in vivo mechanical property of cartilage. As mechanical response may be indicative of cartilage health, this study underscores the need for future studies investigating the characteristic recovery time and in vivo cartilage mechanical response at various stages of OA.