Infrared Spectroscopy of Synovial Fluid Shows Accuracy as an Early Biomarker in an Equine Model of Traumatic Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis is a leading cause of lameness and joint disease in horses. A simple, economical, and accurate diagnostic test is required for routine screening for OA. This study aimed to evaluate infrared (IR)-based synovial fluid biomarker profiling to detect early changes associated with a traumatically induced model of equine carpal osteoarthritis (OA). Unilateral carpal OA was induced arthroscopically in 9 of 17 healthy thoroughbred fillies; the remainder served as Sham-operated controls. The median age of both groups was 2 years. Synovial fluid (SF) was obtained before surgical induction of OA (Day 0) and weekly until Day 63. IR absorbance spectra were acquired from dried SF films. Following spectral pre-processing, predictive models using random forests were used to differentiate OA, Sham, and Control samples. The accuracy for distinguishing between OA and any other joint group was 80%. The classification accuracy by sampling day was 87%. For paired classification tasks, the accuracies by joint were 75% for OA vs. OA Control and 70% for OA vs. Sham. The accuracy for separating horses by group (OA vs. Sham) was 68%. In conclusion, SF IR spectroscopy accurately discriminates traumatically induced OA joints from controls.

Keywords

biomarker, carpal, equine, horse, infrared, model, osteoarthritis, spectroscopy, synovial fluid, traumatic

Citation

Panizzi L, Vignes M, Dittmer KE, Waterland MR, Rogers CW, Sano H, McIlwraith CW, Riley CB. (2024). Infrared Spectroscopy of Synovial Fluid Shows Accuracy as an Early Biomarker in an Equine Model of Traumatic Osteoarthritis.. Animals (Basel). 14. 7. (pp. 986-).

URI

https://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/69609

Collections

Journal Articles

Full item page