RESEARCH ARTICLE
Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS): A Potential Arthroscopic Tool for Quantitative Assessment of Articular Cartilage
Yan-Ping Huang1, Yong-Ping Zheng*, 1, 2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 13
Last Page: 20
Publisher ID: TOBEJ-3-13
DOI: 10.2174/1874120700903010013
Article History:
Received Date: 9/1/2009Revision Received Date: 18/5/2009
Acceptance Date: 20/5/2009
Electronic publication date: 26/6/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Conventional ultrasound examination of the articular cartilage performed externally on the body surface around the joint has limited accuracy due to the inadequacy in frequency used. In contrast to this, minimally invasive arthroscopy-based ultrasound with adequately high frequency may be a better alternative to assess the cartilage. Up to date, no special ultrasound transducer for imaging the cartilage in arthroscopic use has been designed. In this study, we introduced the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) for this purpose. An IVUS system with a catheter-based probe (Ø ≈ 1mm) was used to measure the thickness and surface acoustical reflection of the bovine patellar articular cartilage in vitro before and after degeneration induced by enzyme treatments. Similar measurement was performed using another high frequency ultrasound system (Vevo) with a probe of much larger size and the results were compared between the two systems. The thickness measured using IVUS was highly correlated (r = 0.985, p < 0.001) with that obtained by Vevo. Thickness and surface reflection amplitude measured using IVUS on the enzymatically digested articular cartilage showed changes similar to those obtained by Vevo, which were expectedly consistent with previous investigations. IVUS can be potentially used for the quantitative assessment of articular cartilage, with its ready-to-use arthroscopic feature.
