Osteoarthritis year in review 2025: Imaging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To conduct a narrative review of selected imaging studies published in the past year, with a focus on how emerging methods and multi-tissue assessments are contributing to disease characterization, early detection, and intervention strategies. DESIGN: We conducted a comprehensive search strategy of PubMed, Embase, and CINAHL for original English-language human studies on imaging in osteoarthritis, published between March 2024 and March 2025. From the 262 full-text studies that met inclusion criteria, we identified a set of representative studies through independent review and group discussion. These studies are organized into five themes that emerged from this study: effusion-synovitis, infrapatellar fat pad, muscle, subchondral bone, and subcutaneous fat. Within each theme, one highlighted study and several additional studies were synthesized, followed by a summary of cross-cutting insights and future directions. RESULTS: A total of 26 studies were included. Collectively, the studies reinforce the importance of viewing osteoarthritis as a condition involving multiple joint structures, with inflammation as a recurring feature across tissues. Muscle quality and local adiposity emerged as consistent imaging biomarkers, while accessible tools such as ultrasound and AI-enhanced radiography demonstrated potential for scalable clinical application. Links between imaging findings and biomechanics, particularly gait and loading patterns, also featured prominently. Cross-cutting themes emphasized the value of considering multiple tissues, expanding the reach of imaging to clinical and community settings, and integrating imaging with functional measures. CONCLUSIONS: Imaging research in the osteoarthritis continues to broaden in scope and application. The studies highlighted in this review illustrate how advances in methods and metrics are improving opportunities for earlier detection, more precise assessment of symptoms, and the development of targeted, structure-informed interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".