Cortical Surface Analysis of Multi-contrast MR Data to Improve Detection of Cortical Pathology in Multiple Sclerosis

摘要

Cortical multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions are very hard to detect on magnetic resonance images, even though histopathology studies reveal that their extent can be important. Certain pulse sequences are known to help detect the lesions, but this detection is still very incomplete. To aid detection, we propose to use a cortical surface-based analysis of multi-contrast MR data in MS and healthy control subjects. We show that magnetization transfer ratio and T1-weighted scans both show differences at the group level between relapsing-remitting MS patients and healthy controls. This suggests that this approach would be useful to help detect cortical pathology in MS.