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Novel optical imaging technique to determine the 3-D orientation of collagen fibers in cartilage: variable-incidence angle polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

The 3-D structure of collagen in articular cartilage is little studied but likely to be a strong determinant of its mechanical properties. In this paper we developed a new optical method to non-destructively determine the true 3-D orientation of collagen fibres in cartilage. Our results non-invasively map structures known to exist using destructive techniques such as polarized light microscopy and SEM. This led to a major EPSRC grant (EP/F020422, £405k) to develop instrumentation that could allow clinical measurements and to develop a rigorous mathematical model capable of extracting depth-resolved collagen alignment information from cartilage in-situ: a world-first.