EAVESDROPPING on the inaudible rumblings of damaged knees could help doctors diagnose diseases such as osteoarthritisor let football managers decide if an injured player is ready to take to the pitch again.
Many knee conditions involve damage to cartilage, the soft tissue on the ends of bones that cushions the joint. When a joint is in action, the cartilage gets compressed and vibrates and some doctors have used stethoscopes or even a small microphone to amplify the sound it makes. But it's hard for doctors to tell the sounds of healthy and damaged cartilage apart, so they mostly prefer expensive magnetic resonance imaging for examining joints. According to Canadian researchers, however, they've been listening to the wrong sound frequencies all along.
Sridhar Krishnan and his team at Ryerson University in Toronto have applied for a patent on a diagnostic device that relies on vibration sensors similar to those in ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.