The Musculoskeletal Team

Human Musculoskeletal (MSK) system is an organ system which confers the ability of movement upon you. It is made up of bones, muscles, cartilages, joints, tendons, ligaments, and other connective tissues and provide you with the form, support, stability and movement of your body. There are a wide variety of research fields related to the MSK system of which our interest goes into the cortical bone assessment. As you may know, there are several techniques which are used to pursue this goal, but all of them have serious limitations. There exists DEXA as the current gold standard which cannot distinguish the cortical bone from the trabecular and is only sensitive to the minerals. There exists QCT as another alternative which is not accurate, reproducible, and again only sensitive to the minerals. Recently, a new field of research is just burgeoning in which the main focus is on the hydrogen micro-environments and majorly water of the cortical bone.

There exist three types of water in the cortical bone; First, water molecules loosely bound to the collagen matrix, Second, water molecules tightly bound to the minerals, and Third, water molecules freely residing in the pores of the cortical bone. Ergo, regarding this new perspective of cortical bone, in order to proceed further in this field, a quantitative imaging tool is highly essential. A tool not only with the capability of quantifying the water content of the cortical bone, but also with the ability to discriminate between different water pools.

Here in the QMISG, we employ the Solid State MRI techniques (the most well-established tool in the arena of quantitative MSK Imaging) to quantify different water pools separately.

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Our Musculoskeletal Team Members

 

                  Malakeh Malek Zadeh ( Mentor )

                     Hamid Emadi

                     Shahrokh Abbasi Rad

                       Nazanin Mobini

                       Mahsa Talebi

parisa naghdi                       Parisa Naghdi

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