Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein

Yes.

This study, I'll try to explain it in a not too boring or complex way, but I'm so excited about it because no one has ever really been able to study like real-time estrogen and relaxin levels with laxity of the ACL.

And we have a way that we do that.

Basically, it makes ligaments more...

You know, I don't actually know the actual ebb and flow of relaxin with the menstrual cycle.

Yes.

And pregnancy is very high.

Yeah.

But we're including it in our study with the estradiol levels.

But what we do is we check real time because obviously these things change over the course of a month or in women as they get older, you know, they're not steady state.

But so we have these hormone levels and then we basically make these models of knees from MRIs and we've developed machine learning so that in...

just a couple of minutes, we can create a whole three-dimensional model of the knee that shows, traces the whole ACL, all the cartilage surfaces, all the structures of the knee.

Then we have women who we have their blood levels.

We can test them with and without fatigue.

So we're combining hormone levels plus fatigue as a component.

And then we have them do a test where they kind of jump off of a block and land, basically.

And then we have this fancy setup with live fluoroscopy or x-ray from different angles.

It's called biplanar fluoroscopy.

And we overlay the model, the three-dimensional model we made of their knee on their knee with movement.

And then we can actually measure in these moments of jump landing how much the ACL stretches or how much strain there is on it.