We are thrilled to receive a 1-year R56 bridge grant from The National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease (NIAMS).
This new funding will support our lab to develop a multi-parametric imaging method capable of providing rapid, accurate, and efficient non-invasive imaging biomarkers to assess knee joint degeneration in knee osteoarthritis. This one-year grant will provide a precious opportunity for our team to build up a fundamental imaging pipeline and develop a new acquisition and reconstruction method toward the goal of this project.
We thank the grant sponsors for their support in this project.
This proposal will develop a simultaneous multi-component T2 relaxation and cross-relaxation imaging technique that can provide sensitive and specific imaging biomarkers to assess cartilage proteoglycan and collagen content and their ultra-structures in a unified imaging framework. The imaging technique will be optimized using rigorous statistical methods and accelerated through a novel deep learning method that leverages self-supervised learning and MR physics-informed tissue modeling. Successful completion of the proposal will provide the osteoarthritis research community with a new set of MR biomarkers to non-invasively monitor disease-related and treatment-related changes in tissue composition and ultra-structure in human subjects.
NIH RePORT