Imaging Expert Working Group

History

In 2002, the MRI Expert Working Group held their first meeting and a business plan was developed. Following this, in March 2003, Drs. Kilcoyne, Babyn, Lundin and Doria met in Toronto, Canada. This initial collaborative work resulted in two publications (Lundin B et al., 2005 & Doria AS et al., 2005) and provoked a specific commentary in the journal Haemophilia (Anonymous., 2005. Also in 2003, the MRI Expert Working Group convened during the first IPSG Symposium in Montreal, Canada (Feldman BM et al., 2005) to review the work from the meeting in March and to plan the group’s future goals and activities.

In March 2004, Drs. Kilcoyne, Babyn, Lundin and Doria met again in Toronto, Canada. The work achieved at this meeting resulted in another publication (Doria AS et al., 2006). In October 2005, during the second IPSG Symposium in Munich, Germany, the MRI Expert Working Group came together to discuss their next research objectives. This included changing the name of the group to reflect interest in further imaging techniques, particularly, ultrasound (US). Hence, the group became known as the Imaging Expert Working Group (IEWG), and during the symposium the members planned the group’s following research activity.

Again, in March 2006, Drs. Kilcoyne, Babyn, Lundin and Doria met in Toronto and collectively read MRIs of patient elbows. Stemming from this work, the group’s next publication was completed (Doria AS et al., 2008). The third IPSG Symposium was held in Toronto in 2007, there the IEWG reviewed the compatible scoring scheme and a reduced single-scale version was outlined. In August 2008, the group met in Toronto to test the new version of the scale. Between 2008 and 2012, the group continued to work on an outcome measurement scale, in particular the IPSG 17-point MRI scale that was revised to include more comprehensive criteria for subchondral cysts and cartilage degradation (Lundin B et al., 2012). This MRI scale proved capable of discerning soft tissue and osteochondral changes and has been applied by different research groups in several works, including in adapted form for comparison to US measures.

The following years the IEWG shared and discussed experiences of MRI- and US scales at meetings in New York November 2014 and October 2016 (the fifth and sixth IPSG Symposiums) as well as at an interim IEWG-meeting in Malmoe May 2016. As a result the group was now organized in an US Task Force and an MRI subgroup with the respective missions to investigate through surveys how ultrasound is currently implemented and to based on new experiences work on an upgrade of the existing IPSG MRI scale. In the proceedings of these missions the IEWG met in Malmoe November 2018 (the seventh IPSG Symposia) followed by an additional meeting for the MRI Subgroup May 2019. The work of the US Taskforce resulted in two publications (Ignas DM et al., 2020 & Bakeer N et al., 2021), and after final refinements discussed at the ninth IPSG Symposium in Copenhagen October 2022 and an additional meeting of the MRI subgroup in Malmö June 2023 the new IPSG 17 point MRI scale version 2.0 was published (Lundin B et al., 2024).

The IEWG continues its work for further improvements in hemophilia care and has at present ongoing projects in the fields of both US- and MRI assessments as well as a manuscript draft in progress for a publication including reasoned explanations for different choices of imaging modalities in case-based examples of specific clinical situations.