I'm Dr Matt Harkey I'm a researcher at Michigan State University with a research interest on using ultrasound imaging to monitor structural changes in patients following knee injury and knee surgery as a way of identifying the patients at greatest risk of arthritis in that name and today we're going to be focusing on an ultrasound assessment in the anterior infra patellar region of the knee specifically looking at the patellar tendon of the knee you can see that Corey has positioned this probe longitudinally at the kind of inferior pull of the patella which you can see here so that we can get this image of the patellar tendon running from the patella down to the tibia and once we place that probe kind of on the middle portion of the knee there Corey will then kind of move it immediately and laterally to kind of identify that middle portion of the tendon where we get kind of the brightest borders superiorly against the overlying fat in front of the knee as well as uh deep where it's bordering the office fat pad below there and once we have our image you can see one way to kind of assess this tendon is to measure the thickness of this tendon traditionally this is a very difficult uh task because you then have to take the image export it out and then do kind of your fine thickness measurements of that tendon but with this new AI feature within the clarius app what we can do is hit this AI button and what it is able to do is capture a real-time segmentation of the patellar tendon itself to show us those borders of the tendon and once we kind of freeze that image what the the program automatically does is measures the thickest portion of that tendon so that while we're assessing the participants in real time we're able to automatically both segment and get a thickness measurement of that structure and this is important because it will save time save resources in doing these kind of uh a difficult quantitative assessments of structures within the body and allow us to better Monitor and kind of assess joint health following knee injury and knee surgery as well as an individual's response to kind of a season of sports uh it'll allow for this easier assessment over time
