Sodium relaxation times in the knee joint in vivo at 7T

The sodium concentration correlates directly with the concentration of proteoglycans (PG) in cartilage, the loss of which is an early signature of osteoarthritis (OA). As a result, quantitative sodium MRI is a promising technique for assessing the degradation of articular cartilage in patients with OA. Sodium relaxation times can also provide information on the degradation of cartilage: it has already been shown on bovine cartilage that T1 and T2long are longer and T2short shorter when the PG concentration decreases. In this study, sodium T1, T2short* and T2long* relaxation maps were measured in vivo at 7?T on 8 healthy volunteers and in 4 different regions of the cartilage in the knee joint. The patellar, femoro-tibial medial, lateral, and femoral condyle cartilage have an average T1 similar to 20 ms, but different T2short* (from 0.5ms to 1.4ms) and T2long* (from 11.4ms to 14.8ms). Statistically significant differences in T1, T2short* and T2long* were observed between the different regions in cartilage (p << 10(-5)). Statistical differences in T1 were also observed between male and female data (p << 10(-5)). These relaxation times measurements can further be applied as correction factors for sodium concentration maps in vivo and can also be useful as complementary information to quantitative sodium MRI in the quest for detecting early OA. These measurements were done on low resolution sodium images in order to acquire sufficient quality data for fitting (5 images for T1 and 9 images for T2*) while keeping the total time of acquisition of the data reasonable for the volunteers comfort (1h 15min). Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.