Comparing SWI and R2’ for the detection of iron deposition in MS

INTRODUCTION: It has been shown that iron content measuring [1,2] and susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) [3,4] are sensitive to the characteristics of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions, in particular iron content. Based on the observation that SWI can detect lesions not apparent on conventional MS lesion screening protocols, it has been suggested that there may be additional clinical utility in characterizing lesions by their iron content. In addition, it has been shown that SWI is sensitive to increased iron in the basal ganglia and other subcortical regions in MS. We propose to study the clinical utility of SWI and other iron-content sensitive methods, such as R2' and T2 mapping, in MS. In this work, we show that, although both have a high sensitivity to iron content, R2’ imaging provides more specificity to iron content in MS patients than SWI.