Research Article The Longitudinal Assessment of Osteomyelitis Development by Molecular Imaging in a Rabbit Model

Copyright © 2014 Jim C. E. Odekerken et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Introduction. Osteomyelitis is a severe orthopaedic complication which is difficult to diagnose and treat. Previous experimental studies mainly focussed on evaluating osteomyelitis in the presence of an implant or used a sclerosing agent to promote infection onset. In contrast, we focused on the longitudinal assessment of a nonimplant related osteomyelitis.Methods. An intramedullary tibial infection with S. aureus was established in NZW rabbits. Clinical and haematological infection status was evaluated weekly, combined with X-ray radiographs, biweekly injections of calcium binding fluorophores, and postmortem micro-CT. Th