Osteoarthritis (OA) is a debilitating, degenerative disease of articular cartilage in synovial joints afflicting an estimated 27 million adults in the United States alone with an annual cost of $80 billion. The mechanical function of cartilage declines during OA progression, resulting from softening of the tissue coupled with increased friction and wear. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is currently a gold standard for diagnosing late-stage OA, but there remains a need to detect early- to mid-stage OA in vivo to possibly prevent the need for invasive and costly total joint replacement surgery. Moderate but limited success has been achieved with quantitative MRI (qMRI), including T1ρ and T2 mapping. qMRI parameters are thought to be sensitive to biochemical changes in diseased cartilage, but ignore associated mechanical changes. Displacement-encoded MRI (deMRI) allows for the measurement of deformation in articular cartilage during cyclic loading, and may be sensitive to changing mechanical function. The specific aims of this work were 1) to understand the distribution of strains and related parameters in explanted cartilage from human volunteers with OA, 2) determine the ability of deMRI to assay and detect OA as defined by a quantitative metric, 3) compare the potential of deMRI to that of qMRI for OA detection, and 4) determine if these measures can be used together to best predict OA in the earliest stages.