Page 107 - Imaging of Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis in Hand Joints

Accuracy of low field MRI in early arthritis
Figure 1. Patient flowchart
*= Patients that could not be included for logistical reasons were patients who wanted to participate,
but for who it was not possible to plan both MRI examinations before starting therapy. 6
Low field versus high field MRI
With 1.5T MRI, 19 out of 40 patients had one or more joints with synovitis, 19 had erosions, 17 had BME. Table 2 displays the amount of detected pathology for both MRI methods, and their agreement in cases. There was good agreement between both MRI methods for synovitis detection (κ=0.65). In most cases where the MRI results did not match, contrast enhancement was visible on both image sets, but synovitis was scored 2 on one image set and 1 on the other. An example of this is shown in Fig 2. On patient level, 17 patients had synovitis with both methods, 2 patients were identified with 1.5T MRI only and 5 patients with 0.2T MRI only. Synovitis was detected the most in the second MCP joint and the radiocarpal joint.
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