CARTILAGE IMAGING (S TRATTNIG, SECTION EDITOR) Sodium MR Imaging of Articular Cartilage Pathologies

The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Many studies have proved that noninvasive sodium MR imaging can directly determine the cartilage GAG content, which plays a central role in cartilage homeostasis. New technical developments in the recent decade have helped to transfer this method from in vitro to pre-clinical in vivo studies. Sodium imaging has already been applied for the evaluation of cartilage and repair tis-sue in patients after various cartilage repair surgery tech-niques and in patients with osteoarthritis. These studies showed that this technique could be helpful not only for assessment of the cartilage status, but also predictive for osteoarthritis. However, due to the low detectable sodium MR signal in cartilage, sodium imaging is still challenging, and further hardware and software improvements are nec-essary for translating sodium MR imaging into clinical practice, preferably to 3T MR systems