Osteoarthritis year in review 2018: imaging

To provide a narrative review of the most relevant original research published in 2017/2018 on osteoarthritis imaging.

The PubMed database was used to recover all relevant articles pertaining to osteoarthritis and medical imaging published between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2018. Review articles, case studies and in vitro or animal studies were excluded. The original publications were subjectively sorted based on relevance, novelty and impact.

The publication search yielded 1,155 references. In the assessed publications, the most common imaging modalities were radiography (N = 708) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (355), followed by computed tomography (CT) (220), ultrasound (85) and nuclear medicine (17). An overview of the most important publications to the osteoarthritis (OA) research community is presented in this narrative review. Imaging studies play an increasingly important role in OA research, and have helped us to understand better the pathophysiology of OA. Radiography and MRI continue to be the most applied imaging modalities, while quantitative MRI methods and texture analysis are becoming more popular. The value of ultrasound in OA research has been demonstrated. Several multi-modality predictive models have been developed. Deep learning has potential for more automatic and standardized analyses in future OA imaging research.