| Popis: |
The assessment of joint damage in experimentally induced inflammatory arthritis has always been difficult and has usually involved a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, for example, (1) the measurement of joint diameter, (2) serial histological sections, and (3) radiography. The limitations of these methods are, first, joint diameter does not always reflect the damage in the joint; second, histology is time consuming and it is difficult to obtain an evaluation of joint damage in three dimensions; third, the resolution of the radiographs produced by clinical machines enables the alterations in arthritic joints to be described qualitatively and/or by simple mensural assessments such as scoring systems, cortical indices and densito-metric analyses. |
