Table 3.

Average strength of recommendation from the 12 persons on the working group who responded to the survey. The response scale ranged from 0 (don't recommend) to 100 (strongly recommend).

General comments	Strength of recommendation (range 0–100)#
Evaluation of age dependence of structural changes (cartilage thickness and others) due to mechanical stress in different age groups.	74
Conventional radiography
For joint space width, measurement performance (reliability and responsiveness) dependency on projection technique, dependency on axial loading studies need to be done	71
For bony changes (osteophytes, erosions, cysts, attrition) dependency of reproducibility on projection technique needs study	74
MRI
Comparison between quantitative cartilage volume/thickness with semi-quantitative scoring such as HOAMS and SHOMRI should be performed.	74
Further investigation should also be done for compositional MR methods such as T2 mapping and T1rho to find correlations between macro-and microstructure changes in the hip joint.	71
Further investigation should be done for MRI assessment of femoroacetabular impingement and its potential relationship to the onset of hip OA	78
A correlation with clinical scores, clinical importance of individual variables in the semi-quantitative scoring systems as well as with quantitative values of the compositional MR techniques should be performed.	88
Develop and appraise methods that will allow qualitative (semi- quantitative) measures to be quantitatively assessed as well as development of semi-automated to fully automated measures.	78
Improved detection, quantification and measurement performance of structural, compositional changes of hyaline and fibrocartilage using MRI.	67
Development of semi-quantitative and quantitative as well as fully automated evaluation of inflammatory changes of the synovium.	80
Clinical validation of MRI methods and techniques in general - What is their ability to predict real hip replacement?	90