Tendinopathy diagnosis and treatment monitoring using attenuated total reflectance‐Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy

Abstract

Tendinopathy, an important sports injury afflicting athletes and general public, is associated with huge economic losses. The currently used diagnostic tests are subjective, show moderate sensitivity and specificity; while treatment failures persist despite advances in therapy. This highlights the need for tendinopathy diagnostic and treatment monitoring tools. This study investigates tendon injury, natural healing and effect of treatment using ATR-FTIR complemented with histopathology. Control (C), injured (I) and treated (T) rat tendons were extracted 3, 7, 14 and 28 days post-injury/treatment, representing phases of healing; and subjected to hematoxylin & eosin staining as well as spectroscopy. While C showed no change, I- and T-related histological changes could be clearly observed in stained sections. ATR-FTIR spectra highlighted the biochemical changes within groups. Multivariate analysis could classify C, I and T with 75%; different days between groups with 84%; and different days within group with 65% efficiency. Results suggest that such analysis can not only identify C, I or T but also different phases of healing. Difference between I and T at different time points also suggest change in rate of healing. Further studies may help develop this technique for clinical diagnosis and treatment monitoring in future.

Biochemical detection of fatal hypothermia and hyperthermia in affected rat hypothalamus tissues by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy

“…The greatest benefit of FTIR technique lies in its highly sensitive acquisition of the whole ‘-omics’ of a biological sample, which enables the detection of molecular changes that may reflect the onset and progression of a disease, thus enabling disease diagnosis and monitoring [29]. Up to now, this technique has been widely used in the medical field for cancer diagnoses, such as skin [30], breast [31,32], cervical [33], colon [34] and kidney tumors [35], detections of antibiotics’ resistant Escherichia coli bacteria [36], human papillomavirus [37] and malaria infected red blood cells [38], and monitoring of tendinopathy [39] and chronic venous leg ulcer exudates [40].…”

FTIR study of Achilles tendinopathy: protein secondary structure changes in tendon post injury

“…Considering the economic and productivity losses associated with this ailment (Hopkins et al, 2016), discovery of a better diagnostic/ monitoring technique is imperative. In our previous study, we have shown that Attenuated Reflectance -Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) has potential in identifying injury and treatment progress (Bhattacharjee et al, 2018). However, the output is based complex mathematical models generated by Principal Component -Linear Discriminant Analysis (PC-LDA).…”