The aim of this project is the development of MRI-based methods and technologies for non-invasive in vivo assessment of mechanical loads in soft tissue structures in knee joints. Such an in vivo assessment of 3D soft tissue kinematics, together with their incident loads, would pave the way for a better understanding of deformations of tendons, ligaments and menisci in healthy subjects as well as their changes due to pathologies (e.g., after ruptures of the anterior cruciate ligament in young vs. elderly patients).

PROJECT GOALS

Given the short acquisition times available in the dynamic imaging setup only partial information (low-resolution images) can be acquired. Therefore, specialized reconstruction methods have to be developed in order to extract the motion of soft tissues from the incomplete data by correlating the information from high-resolution static images with low-resolution dynamic sequences.