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 be
identified 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
from the OCT images. Changes in the crack size of the tear may be useful for understanding the failure mechanism of
meniscal tears.
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