RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 A three year follow-up study of gadolinium enhanced and non-enhanced regions in multiple sclerosis lesions using a multi-compartment <em>T</em><sub>2</sub> relaxometry model
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 365379
DO 10.1101/365379
A1 Chatterjee, Sudhanya
A1 Commowick, Olivier
A1 Afacan, Onur
A1 Combes, Benoit
A1 Warfield, Simon K.
A1 Barillot, Christian
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/09/365379.1.abstract
AB Demyelination, axonal damage and inflammation are critical indicators of the onset and progress of neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) in patients. Due to physical limitations of imaging such as acquisition time and imaging resolution, a voxel in a MR image is heterogeneous in terms of tissue microstructure such as myelin, axons, intra and extra cellular fluids and free water. We present a multi-compartment tissue model which estimates the water fraction (WF) of tissues with short, medium and high T2 relaxation times in a T2 relaxometry MRI voxel. The proposed method is validated on test-retest data of healthy controls. This model was then used to study longitudinal trends of the tissue microstructures for two sub-regions of the lesions: gadolinium enhanced (E+) and non-enhanced (L–) regions of MS lesions in 10 MS patients over a period of three years. The water fraction values in E+ and L– regions were found to be significantly different (p &lt; 0.05) over the period of first three months. The results of this study also showed that the estimates of the proposed T2 relaxometry model on brain tissue microstructures have potential to distinguish between regions undergoing active blood brain barrier breakdown from the other regions of the lesion.