Infrared microspectroscopic determination of collagen cross-links in articular cartilage

• Collagen forms an organized network in articular cartilage to give tensile stiffness to the tissue. Due to its long half-life, collagen is susceptible to cross-links caused by advanced glycation end-products. The current standard method for determination of cross-link concentrations in tissues is the destructive high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The aim of this study was to analyze the cross-link concentrations nondestructively from standard unstained histological articular cartilage sections by using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy. Half of the bovine articular cartilage samples (n=27) were treated with threose to increase the collagen cross-linking while the other half (n=27) served as a control group. Partial least squares (PLS) regression with variable selection algorithms was used to predict the cross-link concentrations from the measured average FTIR spectra of the samples, and HPLC was used as the reference method for cross-link concentrations. The correlation coefficients between the PLS regression models and the biochemical reference values were r=0.84 (p<0.001), r=0.87 (p<0.001) and r=0.92 (p<0.001) for hydroxylysyl pyridinoline (HP), lysyl pyridinoline (LP), and pentosidine (Pent) cross-links, respectively. The study demonstrated that FTIR microspectroscopy is a feasible method for investigating cross-link concentrations in articular cartilage.

Ämnesord

Medical and Health Sciences  (hsv)

Medical Biotechnology  (hsv)

Biomedical Laboratory Science/Technology  (hsv)

Medicin och hälsovetenskap  (hsv)

Medicinsk bioteknologi  (hsv)

Biomedicinsk laboratorievetenskap/teknologi  (hsv)

Clinical Medicine  (hsv)

Orthopedics  (hsv)

Klinisk medicin  (hsv)

Ortopedi  (hsv)

Engineering and Technology  (hsv)

Medical Engineering  (hsv)

Medical Image Processing  (hsv)

Teknik och teknologier  (hsv)

Medicinteknik  (hsv)

Medicinsk bildbehandling  (hsv)

Computerized Image Analysis  (umu)

datoriserad bildanalys  (umu)

Orthopaedics  (umu)

ortopedi  (umu)

Nyckelord

articular cartilage

collagen

cross-links

infrared spectroscopy

multivariate analysis