SORS of Osteoarthritic Cartilage

Spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) probes subsurface composition without sectioning tissue. Applied to bovine cartilage, this work establishes the first nondestructive method for mapping depth-dependent mechanical properties — Young’s modulus and shear modulus — as a function of tissue depth and degradation state.

The technique could enable in vivo osteoarthritis staging without biopsy.

Contributions

1. Designed SORS acquisition geometry and offset sequence for cartilage penetration depths.
2. Developed spectral decomposition pipeline to isolate depth-resolved Raman signals.
3. Correlated Raman signatures with mechanically measured elastic moduli across trypsin-treated samples.