Breaking Barriers Through Multi-Disciplinary Osteoarthritis Research-
the OARSI World Congress in Vienna, April 18-21, 2024

Scientists from Chondrometrics and PMU will be delivering an oral presentation and several posters on quantitative measurement methodology of articular tissue pathology, as featured in this post.

The OARSI World Congress is the largest global platform of those engaged in osteoarthritis (OA) research. It attracts professionals from diverse disciplines in academia & industry, basic, translational and clinical scientists, allied health professionals, and policy makers. This year, the congress is held at Messe Wien Congress Center, and anticipates attracting >1,000 attendees from >40 countries. OARSI, the Osteoarthritis Research Society International, is the premier society to advance the understanding and treatment of OA, a debilitating condition affecting >600 million people worldwide.

Felix Eckstein, Research Professor at Paracelsus Medical University (PMU, Salzburg, Austria), and CEO of Chondrometrics GmbH (Freilassing, Germany) has recently become the Austrian National Ambassador for OARSI. He enthusiastically anticipates the World Congress to be hosted in the country of his academic work, his research group being affiliated with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Arthritis and Rehabilitation (LBIAR) under leadership of Tanja Stamm.

On Friday, April 19 (8:45-10:15, Abstract No. 020) he will give a talk supported by a team from Formation Bio, owner of a potentially disease-modifying OA drug: “Sprifermin”. The presentation will focus on whether analyzing magnetic resonance images (MRIs) without blinding to relative acquisition order affects observed effect sizes of drug efficacy on cartilage thickness in the FORWARD trial. He will also present a poster (No 90) on the clinical validation of fully automated measurement of cartilage composition using MRI (T2), employing deep learning (AI). This work involves researchers from Charité (Nicholas Brisson & Georg Duda) and 4P Pharma (Francis Berenbaum) and is part of both the OVERLOAD and OA-BIO Eurostars project.

Susanne Maschek, Chief of Education and Quality Control at CHM, will present a poster (No 492) on the impact of MRI scanner field strength on cartilage T2. The study includes a low-field magnet (0.55 Tesla) suitable for outpatient settings, clinical ( 1.5 and 3.0T), and a high-field research scanner (7.0T). The work was performed in collaboration with Frank Roemer’s group at the University of Erlangen and representatives of Siemens Healthcare.

Anna Wisser, Project Manager at PMU and CHM, will present a poster (No 207) on whether diabetes mellitus affects physical function and thigh muscle strength in participants of the Osteoarthritis Initiative. The study is part of a broader project exploring the impact of blood surgar on tissue structure and pathology in OA within the LBIAR.

Clement Heistracher, PhD candidate of Jana Eder at PMU will contribute a poster (No 084) on fully unsupervised automated segmentation of muscle and adipose tissue of thigh MRIs. Automated segmentation is performed without labeled data, providing a substantial advance in automated image segmentation technology.

Wolfgang Wirth, Senior Postdoc at PMU and Chief Technology Officer at CHM, will present a poster (No 491) on fully automated segmentation, comparing the ability of different MRI sequences in detecting OA cartilage thickness change, with co-authors Akshay Chaudhari from Stanford University and David Hunter from the University of Sydney. A second poster (No 493) explores the magnitude of sex-differences in radiographic knee joint space width (JSW), a commonly used measure of OA status and progression. It further studies „genuine“ sexual dimorphism in JSW and cartilage morphometric measuring, comparing female and male Osteoarthritis Initiative participants with the same body height. The poster is part of a broader initiative to characterize sex differences in (peri-) articular tissues as potential risk factors for knee OA, currently submitted to a special issue of the Journal of Osteoarthritis & Cartilage.