True MRI assessment of stem cell chondrogenesis in a tissue engineered matrix

Developing a non-invasive method to monitor the growth of tissue-engineered cartilage is of utmost importance for tracking the progress and predicting the success or failure of tissue-engineering approaches. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a leading non-invasive technique suitable for follow-through in preclinical and clinical stages. As complex tissue-engineering approaches are being developed for cartilage tissue engineering, it is important to develop strategies for true non-invasive MRI monitoring that can take into account contributions of the scaffold, cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) using MR parameters. In the current study, we present the preliminary MRI assessment of chondrogenic differentiation of human bone marrow derived stem cells seeded onto a specially designed osteochondral matrix system. We performed water relaxation times (T₁ and T₂) MRI measurements at 7, 14 and 28 days after cell seeding. The MRI experiments were performed for the tissue-engineered cartilage as well as for acellular scaffolds. We identified that the contribution of the scaffold is the dominant contribution in MR parameters of engineered cartilage and that it hinders observation of the tissue growth. An attempt is made to filter out this contribution, for the first time, in order to make a true observation of tissue growth using MRI.