Better care for osteoarthritis
Advances in medical image processing may hold the key to helping scientists from Queensland University of Technology improve the diagnosis and treatment of osteoarthritis.
Professor Geoff Dougherty from California State University Channel Islands has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to visit QUT for six months to collaborate with Professor Jim Pope on a project aimed at better understanding the structure of cartilage and the changes that occur in early stages of osteoarthritis.
As an expert in medical imaging, Professor Dougherty brings with him vast experience in digital image processing.
“It is possible to extract rich information from medical images obtained from MRI, CT and ultrasound for example, to help us in the diagnosis and treatment of such pervasive diseases as osteoarthritis and osteoporosis,” Professor Dougherty said.
“At a very basic level the degradation of cartilage that occurs in osteoarthritis is due to the disruption of collagen fibres which make up cartilage.
“So what we are trying to do is develop techniques that give us more quantitative information about the state of health of cartilage before it starts to degrade irreversibly.”
Professor Dougherty said the hallmark of the early stages of osteoarthritis was a very subtle change in the composition and microstructure of the tissue that was not discernible from normal images.
“The images produced by Professor Pope’s group using MRI, instead of simply being anatomical images, are functional images in that they tell us something about the internal structure of the tissue and how it is modified from normal tissue,” Professor Dougherty said.
“We are trying to quantify those changes by employing advanced digital image processing techniques that can identify features that are present in the image, but which may not be visible with the naked eye and distil them in such a way as to highlight subtle changes with disease.”
Professor Jim Pope, from QUT’s Faculty of Science and Technology, said osteoarthritis was a very common and debilitating disease.
“About one in four people will suffer from osteoarthritis within their lifetime and as the population ages it is becoming an increasing problem,” Professor Pope said.
“Realistically if you live long enough you will most likely get it.”
The Fulbright scholarship is a flagship international exchange program sponsored by the United States Government whereby participants are chosen based on their academic merit and the leadership potential of the study.
