The potential of optical coherence tomography in meniscal tear characterization

Meniscal tear is one of the most common knee injuries leading to pain and discomfort. Partial and total meniscectomies have been widely used to treat the avascular meniscal injuries in which tears do not heal spontaneously. However, the meniscectomies would cause an alteration of the tibiofemoral contact mechanics resulting in progressive osteoarthritis (OA). To mitigate the progression of OA, maximal preservation of meniscal tissue is recommended. The clinical challenge is deciding which meniscal tears are amenable to repair and which part of damaged tissues should be removed. Current diagnosis techniques such as arthroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging can provide macrostructural information of menisci, but the microstructural changes that occur prior to the observable meniscal tears cannot beidentified by these techniques. Serving as a nondestructive optical biopsy, optical coherence tomography (OCT), a newly developed imaging modality, can provide high resolution, cross-sectional images of tissues and has been shown its capabilty in arthroscopic evaulation of articular cartilage. Our research was to demonstrate the potential of using OCT for nondestructive characterization of the histopathology of different types of meniscal tears from clinical cases in dogs, providing a fundamental understanding of the failure mechanism of meniscal tears. First, cross-sectional images of torn canine menisci obtained from the OCT and scanning electronic microscopy (SEM) were be compared. By studying the organization of collegan fibrils in torn menisci from the SEM images, the feasibility of using OCT to characterize the organization of collegan fibrils was elucidated. Moreover, the crack size of meniscal tears was quantatitively measured rom the OCT images. Changes in the crack size of the tear may be useful for understanding the failure mechanism of eniscal tears.