Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common joint disorder affecting the middle-aged and elderly people, with a significant impact on disability, functioning, and healthcare utilization. The gold standard for the diagnosis of OA is through radiography using the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grading system. However, radiographic OA is a late-stage condition where disease-modifying opportunities are limited, as OA typically develops over decades. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging can detect morphological changes visually in soft tissues such as articular cartilage, ligaments, labrum, meniscus, bone marrow, and synovium. Hence, this imaging modality is helpful to study painful joints. Several morphological grading systems have been established, that can semi-quantitatively assess the pathological features through MR imaging, allowing cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of OA severity. More recently, with the help of advanced MR sequences a quantitative assessment can be obtained of the articular cartilage composition changes occurring before the morphologic changes that are evident. These biomarkers, known as cartilage relaxation times, are sensitive to the compositional changes occurring in the cartilage associated with early OA. It has been more and more commonly adopted in research to provide early identification of OA. A better understanding of the natural history of osteoarthritis can be enabled by defining and characterizing OA in its earlier stage itself. This also might help with the development as well as examination of disease-modifying treatments.