Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Osteoarthritis is the leading cause of disability in older adults and costs Canada $27 billion/year. Osteoarthritis is a chronic disease that causes degeneration of all tissues in the knee. Individuals who injure the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) of their knee commonly get osteoarthritis, but we don't understand why. We believe that changes in the way they walk after surgery, called their biomechanics, is what causes their osteoarthritis. We think that if we can restore normal biomechanics, we can prevent osteoarthritis. To understand what causes osteoarthritis after ACL injury we need to measure changes in the biomechanics and all tissues of the knee that occur in the months after injury. To enable this type of research, we require new technologies. First, we need a way of measuring changes in the whole knee. Currently, we measure many properties of the knee using MRIs but we have a poor understanding of the shape and function of the whole knee. To address this problem, I will use artificial intelligence to analyze MRIs of the knee and measure all knee tissues simultaneously. Second, we need ways to measure biomechanics of movement at an MRI. Biomechanics are important measures of health that doctors can't currently measure. I and a team of researchers at Stanford are developing technology that uses wearable sensors, which are like a smartwatch, to easily measure people's biomechanics. I will use these technologies to study how the biomechanics and all knee tissues change over the course of a year in 30 people with ACL surgery and 30 healthy people. I will use this data to see what changes in biomechanics of the ACL injured knee occur before degenerative changes to the knee tissues. These technologies provide new information about whole joint health and the biomechanics of how people move. Importantly, the ACL study will help identify how we can prevent development of painful and debilitating osteoarthritis, improving patient function and quality of life.