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BackgroundQuantitative in vivo imaging of myelin loss and repair in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) is essential to understand the pathogenesis of the disease and to evaluate promyelinating therapies. Selectively binding myelin in the central nervous system white matter, Pittsburgh compound B ([11C]PiB) can be used as a positron emission tomography (PET) tracer to explore myelin dynamics in MS.MethodsPatients with active relapsing‐remitting MS (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 8) were included in a longitudinal trial combining PET with [11C]PiB and magnetic resonance imaging. Voxel‐wise maps of [11C]PiB distribution volume ratio, reflecting myelin content, were derived. Three dynamic indices were calculated for each patient: the global index of myelin content change; the index of demyelination; and the index of remyelination.ResultsAt baseline, there was a progressive reduction in [11C]PiB binding from the normal‐appearing white matter to MS lesions, reflecting a decline in myelin content. White matter lesions were characterized by a centripetal decrease in the tracer binding at the voxel level. During follow‐up, high between‐patient variability was found for all indices of myelin content change. Dynamic remyelination was inversely correlated with clinical disability (p = 0.006 and beta‐coefficient = –0.67 with the Expanded Disability Status Scale; p = 0.003 and beta‐coefficient = –0.68 with the MS Severity Scale), whereas no significant clinical correlation was found for the demyelination index.Interpretation[11C]PiB PET allows quantification of myelin dynamics in MS and enables stratification of patients depending on their individual remyelination potential, which significantly correlates with clinical disability. This technique should be considered to assess novel promyelinating drugs. Ann Neurol 2016;79:726–738

Objectives:To explore in-vivo innate immune cell activation as a function of the distance from ventricular CSF in patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) using [18F]-DPA714 PET, and to investigate its relationship with periventricular microstructural damage, evaluated by magnetization transfer ratio (MTR), and with trajectories of disability worsening.Methods:Thirty-seven MS patients and nineteen healthy controls underwent MRI and [18F]-DPA714 TSPO dynamic PET, from which individual maps of voxels characterized by innate immune cell activation (DPA+) were generated. White matter (WM) was divided in 3mm-thick concentric rings radiating from the ventricular surface toward the cortex, and the percentage of DPA+ voxels and mean MTR were extracted from each ring. Two-year trajectories of disability worsening were collected to identify patients with and without recent disability worsening.Results:The percentage of DPA+ voxels was higher in patients compared to controls in the periventricular WM (p=6.10e-6), and declined with increasing distance from ventricular surface, with a steeper gradient in patients compared to controls (p=0.001). This gradient was found both in periventricular lesions and normal-appearing WM. In the total WM, it correlated with a gradient of microstructural tissue damage measured by MTR (rs=-0.65, p=1.0e-3). When compared to clinically stable patients, patients with disability worsening were characterized by a higher percentage of DPA+ voxels in the periventricular normal-appearing WM (p=0.025).Conclusions:Our results demonstrate that in MS the innate immune cell activation predominates in periventricular regions and associates with microstructural damage and disability worsening. This could result from the diffusion of pro-inflammatory CSF-derived factors into surrounding tissues.

To develop a novel approach to generate individual maps of white matter (WM) innate immune cell activation using 18 F-DPA-714 translocator protein (TSPO) positron emission tomography (PET), and to explore the relationship between these maps and individual trajectories of disability worsening in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Methods: Patients with MS (n=37), whose trajectories of disability worsening over the 2 years preceding study entry were calculated, and healthy controls (n=19) underwent magnetic resonance magnetic and 18 F-DPA-714 PET. A threshold of significant activation of 18 F-DPA-714 binding was calculated with a voxel-wise randomized permutation-based comparison between patients and controls, and used to classify each WM voxel in patients as characterized by a significant activation of innate immune cells (DPA+) or not. Individual maps of innate immune cell activation in the WM were employed to calculate the extent of activation in WM regions-of-interests and to classify each WM lesion as "DPA-active", "DPA-inactive" or "unclassified". Results: Compared with the WM of healthy controls, patients with MS had a significantly higher percentage of DPA+ voxels in the normal-appearing WM, (NAWM in patients=24.99.7%; WM in controls=14.07.8%, p<0.001). In patients with MS, the percentage of DPA+ voxels showed a significant increase from NAWM, to perilesional areas, T2 hyperintense lesions and T1 hypointense lesions (38.113.5%, 45.017.9%, and 51.922.9%, respectively, p<0.001). Among the 1379 T2 lesions identified, 512 were defined as DPAactive and 258 as DPA-inactive. A higher number of lesions classified as DPA-active (OR=1.13, p=0.009), a higher percentage of DPA+ voxels in the NAWM (OR=1.16, p=0.009) and in T1-spin-echo lesions (OR=1.06, p=0.036), were significantly associated by Imperial College London Library on February 11, 2020. For personal use only. jnm.snmjournals.org Downloaded from 2 with a retrospective more severe clinical trajectory in patients with MS. Conclusion: A more severe trajectory of disability worsening in MS is associated with an innate immune cells activation inside and around WM lesions. 18 F-DPA-714 PET may provide a promising biomarker to identify patients at risk of severe clinical trajectory.

DW-MRS showed a reduction in tCr diffusivity in the normal-appearing brain of patients with MS, which might reflect a state of ongoing energy dysregulation affecting neurons and/or glial cells. Reversing this energy dysregulation before neuro-axonal degeneration arises may become a key objective in future neuroprotective strategies.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). A reliable measure of the tissue myelin content is therefore essential to understand the physiopathology of MS, track progression and assess treatment efficacy. Positron emission tomography (PET) with [ 11 C]PIB has been proposed as a promising biomarker for measuring myelin content changes in-vivo in MS. However, PET imaging is expensive and invasive due to the injection of a radioactive tracer. On the contrary, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive, widely available technique, but existing MRI sequences do not provide, to date, a reliable, specific, or direct marker of either demyelination or remyelination. In this work, we therefore propose Sketcher-Refiner Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with specifically designed adversarial loss functions to predict the PET-derived myelin content map from a combination of MRI modalities. The prediction problem is solved by a sketch-refinement process in which the sketcher generates the preliminary anatomical and physiological information and the refiner refines and generates images reflecting the tissue myelin content in the human brain. We evaluated the ability of our method to predict myelin content at both global and voxel-wise levels. The evaluation results show that the demyelination in lesion regions and myelin content in normalappearing white matter (NAWM) can be well predicted by our method. The method has the potential to become a useful tool for clinical management of patients with MS.

Background and ObjectivesRecent imaging studies have suggested a possible involvement of the choroid plexus (CP) in multiple sclerosis (MS). Here, we investigated whether CP changes are already detectable at the earliest stage of MS, preceding symptom onset.MethodsThis study is a retrospective analysis of 27 patients with presymptomatic MS, 97 patients with clinically definite MS (CDMS), and 53 healthy controls (HCs) who underwent a cross-sectional 3T-MRI acquisition; of which, 22 MS, 19 HCs, and 1 presymptomatic MS (evaluated 8 months before conversion to CDMS) also underwent translocator protein (TSPO)18F-DPA-714 PET and were included in the analysis. CPs were manually segmented on 3D T1-weighted images for volumetric analysis. CP18F-DPA-714 uptake, reflecting inflammation, was calculated as the average standardized uptake value (SUV). Multivariable regressions adjusted for age, sex, and ventricular and brain volume were fitted to test CP volume differences between presymptomatic patients and MS or HCs. For the presymptomatic case who also had18F-DPA-714 PET, CP SUV differences with MS and HCs were assessed through Crawford-Howell tests. To provide further insight into the interpretation of18F-DPA-714-PET uptake at the CP level, a postmortem analysis of CPs in MS vs HCs was performed to characterize the cellular localization of TSPO expression.ResultsCompared with HCs, patients with presymptomatic MS had 32% larger CPs (β = 0.38,p= 0.001), which were not dissimilar to MS CPs (p= 0.69). Moreover, in the baseline scan of the presymptomatic case who later on developed MS, TSPO PET showed 33% greater CP inflammation vs HCs (p= 0.04), although no differences in18F-DPA-714 uptake were found in parenchymal regions vs controls. CP postmortem analysis identified a population of CD163+mononuclear phagocytes expressing TSPO in MS, possibly contributing to the increased18F-DPA-714 uptake.DiscussionWe identified an imaging signature in CPs at the presymptomatic MS stage using MRI; in addition, we found an increased CP inflammation with PET in a single presymptomatic patient. These findings suggest a role of CP imaging as an early biomarker and argue for the involvement of the blood-CSF barrier dysfunction in disease development.Trial Registration InformationAPHP-20210727144630, EudraCT-Number: 2008-004174-40; ClinicalTrials.gov:NCT02305264,NCT01651520, andNCT02319382.

"Fluid-attenuated inversion recovery MRI synthesis from multisequence MRI using threedimensional fully convolutional networks for multiple sclerosis,"