Vibrant Vision

Each year, around 15 million people worldwide seek medical attention for sports or in-house trauma (e.g. ankle sprain). Of these, 1 million people sustained cartilage damage, and demonstrate pain and disability as symptoms. This damage contributes to the onset of osteoarthritis, a disease that is associated with severe joint destruction and pain, which poses a huge socioeconomic burden. For early identification and treatment, a precise diagnosis is of utmost importance. Conventional MRI, CT or ultrasound (US) imaging are not suited for fast screening of all patients at risk due to their relatively long acquisition times and high costs, ionizing load, and inability to image all types of cartilage damage. The aim of the project is to develop a new device for non-invasive, accurate and cost-effective cartilage tissue characterization using acoustic wave technology. This novel tool, Vibrant Vision, combines acoustic wave generation, mechanical loading, and ultrasonic sensing to quantify cartilage damage, e.g. changes in cartilage morphology and stiffness. The challenge is to quantitatively detect the presence of any cartilage damage independent of its appearance, size, and location. Therefore, a complete new concept is proposed: acoustic waves are propagated through the entire joint space in unloaded and in uniformly-loaded condition and a separate receiver senses their responses. To achieve this, unique integration of a wave pulser, a new mechanical indenter to load cartilage surfaces, and an ultrasonic receiver will be realized into one tool. The responses are fed into a new patient specific 3D wave propagation computer model that uses inverse optimization with newly defined wave properties to identify cartilage damage that caused local changes in joint space morphology and stiffness. This Vibrant Vision tool for the first time enables non-invasive quantitative diagnosis of any cartilage damage.