Q&A With RA Imaging Expert Dr. Sharmila Majumdar

Dr. Sharmila Majumdar, Ph.D. is a Professor and Vice-Chair of Research in The Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at University of California San Francisco. Dr. Majumdar's primary research area is musculo-skeletal imaging across modalities, image processing, and more recently machine learning. At UCSF she directs the Musculoskeletal and Quantitative Imaging Research (MQIR) group, which is an interdisciplinary team consisting of faculty, post-doctoral scholars and students. There her collaborators include orthopedic surgeons, rheumatologists, epidemiologists and computational scientists. Her research program continues to focus on musculo-skeletal imaging, and in this context, she has become an authority on musculo-skeletal diseases. In this Q&A, Dr. Majumdar shares her thoughts with us about imaging in rheumatoid arthritis. She addresses the differences between Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis and how they influence the type of imaging we should use, the best imaging modality for RA diagnosis or progression of disease as well as the future for imaging in clinical trials for RA therapeutics.