Determination of Cartilage Thickness in-vivo Using Back Reflection Spectroscopy

Cartilage damage is a major problem with orthopedist and affects millions of people. The development of diagnostic methods is a fact that will enhance the quality of treatment decisions. The gold standard for the diagnosis of articular cartilage damage is visual assessment, which is based on subjective criteria's. In this study, a spectroscopic method was developed to assess the cartilage thickness in-vivo and real time. In total 50 patients were undergoing total knee replacement surgery were recruited regardless of gender. Spectroscopic measurements in visible range were acquired using an optical fiber probe in-vivo. Data of the first 25 patients were used in order to obtain a correlation with the spectroscopic measurements and the cartilage thickness. Then, the correlation was used to estimate the cartilage thickness using data rest of the 25 patients. It has been shown that the developed spectroscopic measurement is able to estimate the cartilage thickness with an error of 12.8 ± 9.5% .