he patient, a 20-year-old male, attended Accident and emergency (A&E) back in September 2023 for a knee injury following a tackle at football. Azubuike and Okojie (2008) conducted a study on football players and the most common type of injuries sustained the second most common injury within the population were that of the knee. An x-ray was performed which showed no abnormality, the patient was referred to the knee clinic for an orthopaedic opinion.
The MRI examination
The patient attended the MRI department a week after the injury to be scanned. The scanner that was used was a Siemens Magnetom Aera 1.5 Tesla scanner. The coil that was used for the examination was a dedicated 15 channel transmit-receive knee coil. Shapiro, Staroswiecki and Gold, 2010 state the best images produced are using a transmit-receive coil regardless of the strength of the magnet.
The student’s institution performs a standard 4 sequence protocol:
Axial PDFS
Sagittal GRE
Sagittal PD
Coronal PDFS
The knee protocol used is heavily proton density (PD) weighted. The proton density sequence is more accurate to visualise hyaline cartilage. (Mohr et al 2003) It is also used as it identifies tendons and menisci. (Sonin et al, 2002) Chein et al 2020 state that PD imaging is more sensitive in diagnosing meniscal pathology then that of a T2 weighted sequence.
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