CHAPTER 19:Uni- and Multi-Parametric Magnetic Resonance Analysis of Cartilage

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used to assess cartilage status in explants, engineered tissue constructs, animal studies and clinical research. Although mean magnetic resonance parameters correlate with cartilage status, there are several challenges attached to classifying tissues based on these measurements. Correlations between MRI parameters and matrix integrity have been established in many studies, but there generally remains a substantial degree of overlap in the parameter values obtained for samples belonging to two groups e.g. control and degraded cartilage. As a result, statistically significant differences observed in the mean values of a given parameter between groups may not yield accurate classification tests. The goal of this chapter is to outline the univariate and multivariate approaches to classification and review the current literature that applies these methods to cartilage MRI.