Non-invasive MRI assessment of the articular cartilage in clinical studies and experimental settings

Figure 1 Comparison of gradient echo (GE) sequence and fat-suppressed (FS) sequence in depicting intra-cartilage lesion. A: Sagittal fat saturated spoiled GE image of the knee in a patient with early OA and a cartilage fissure (arrow); B: Sagittal FS intermediate weighted image of the same patient with the fissure (arrow). Note the difference in contrast with bright cartilage signal in (A) and intermediate cartilage signal in (B). Joint effusion in (B) with bright signal improves visualization of the cartilage fissure (Reproduced by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd from Reference 8).