Number of studies have investigated the orientation dependence of T2 relaxation in articular cartilage and, more importantly, connected the orientation dependence to the properties of the collagen fiber network in cartilage. The dependence arises from the non-averaging secular part of the dipolar coupling, which in turn has been attributed to the water-orienting properties of the collagenous network. Using high angular resolution sample rotation, this study aimed to measure the in-plane fiber angle, collagen anisotropy as well as the isotropic and anisotropic components of T2 relaxation in cartilage. Potential for extracting physically meaningful properties of cartilage from multi-orientation measurements was demonstrated.
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