Rapid whole cerebrum myelin water imaging using a 3D GRASE sequence

Differentiation and quantification of inflammation, demyelination and axon injury or loss in multiple sclerosis

“…PET ligands targeting the 18 kDa translocator protein, which is upregulated with inflammation, detect neuroinflammation in human diseases including multiple sclerosis and in animal models, but the effectiveness of these PET markers remains to be seen (Banati et al, 2000;Papadopoulos et al, 2006;Chauveau et al, 2009Chauveau et al, , 2011Abourbeh et al, 2012;Xie et al, 2012). Promising advances in imaging myelination have been reported including myelin water imaging (MacKay et al, 1994;Du et al, 2007;Laule et al, 2008;Hwang et al, 2010;Prasloski et al, 2012), magnetization transfer (Inglese et al, 2003;Schmierer et al, 2004Schmierer et al, , 2007aDortch et al, 2011;Stikov et al, 2011;Underhill et al, 2011), optical imaging (Wang et al, 2011a) and myelin-specific PET markers (Wang et al, 2009;Wu et al, 2013). For specifically identifying axon injury and loss, reduced NAA content measured by magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) has been used (De Stefano et al, 1999;Aboul-Enein et al, 2010;Wood et al, 2012).…”

Reduced Myelin Water in the White Matter Tracts of Patients with Niemann-Pick Disease Type C

“…A T1-weighted high-resolution structural scan (3D-T1-turbo field echo with sensitivity encoding: TR, 10 ms; turbo field echo, 3000 ms; TE, 6 ms; TI, 845.88 ms; 170 sections; FOV, 240 mm; voxel size, 1 ϫ 1 mm; section thickness, 1 mm) was collected as well as a multiecho axial gradient and spin-echo scan 7 for T2 measurement (TR, 1000 ms; TE, 10, 20, 30…320 ms; 20 sections acquired at 5-mm thickness reconstructed at 2.5-mm section thickness; in-plane voxel size, 1 ϫ 1 mm; sensitivity encoding, 2232 ϫ 192 matrix).…”

“…7 The myelin water fraction (MWF) in each image voxel was computed as the ratio of the area under the T2 distribution with times of 10 -40 ms to the total area under the distribution. The MWF images were then registered to the T1-weighted anatomic scan.…”

“…6 Hence, a more direct in vivo measure of myelin may be clinically desirable. Here, we evaluated the use of myelin water imaging, 7 a technique that measures the amount of water present within the myelin of white matter tracts and has been used previously to measure abnormalities in multiple sclerosis, 8 to examine the distribution and extent of demyelination in 2 patients with NPC.…”

FLAIR2: A Combination of FLAIR and T2 for Improved MS Lesion Detection

“…By omitting the acquisition of the sagittal 2D-FLAIR, the 2D proton density-weighted image, and potentially the DIR, approximately 20 minutes of acquisition time is saved, which can be invested in acquiring 3D sequences at higher spatial resolution, for instance. In research studies, the remaining scanning time can also be used in the acquisition of advanced MR images, such as myelin water, 26 magnetization transfer imaging, 27 or susceptibility-weighted imaging [28][29][30] for the calculation of frequency maps as measures of MS tissue damage 31 and of R2* maps.…”