%0 Journal Article
%T Infrared Spectroscopy of Synovial Fluid Shows Accuracy as an Early Biomarker in an Equine Model of Traumatic Osteoarthritis.
%A Panizzi L
%A Vignes M
%A Dittmer KE
%A Waterland MR
%A Rogers CW
%A Sano H
%A McIlwraith CW
%A Riley CB
%J Animals (Basel)
%V 14
%N 7
%D 2024 Mar 22
%M 38612225
%F 3.231
%R 10.3390/ani14070986
%X 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.