Osteoarthritis Detection: Rupsa Bhattacharjee is Searching for New Tools

Rupsa Bhattacharjee, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSF, is working on new AI-aided imaging technology to detect osteoarthritis early and allow healthcare professionals to slow its advance. Osteoarthritis currently affects over 32 million adults in the USA, with that number only rising. As a degenerative disease with no reliable cures to reverse the damage, Bhattacharjee knows the key is to find the signs early so that patients might halt progression, rather than wishing they could reverse it.

As part of her research, Bhattacharjee collaborates with Richard Souza, MD, of the Department of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science, which allows her to add motion tracking data to the information she gathers through UCSF’s state of the art MRI machines.

Healthcare access is a key concern for Bhattacharjee, which is why she has also worked to develop AI-aided tools that can extract more detailed information from the most common low-powered MRI machines. This new technology will help ease healthcare access disparities by enhancing the use of common scanners, which will allow more patients to receive diagnostic scans under shorter timeframes. For osteoarthritis, an early diagnosis can mean slowing the progression, which will gift the patient many pain-free years they would not have otherwise been able to enjoy.

This is the first in a series of videos showing our primary investigators and their groundbreaking work at the UCSF Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. These investigators bring imaging insights to the most challenging clinical questions in many different specialties, collaborating with experts across nearly every department at UCSF.