Accelerated Serial MR Imaging in Multiple Sclerosis Using Baseline Scan Information

Introduction: MRI is an important diagnostic tool providing noninvasive evidence of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions in the central nervous system. Assessing longitudinal changes in lesion volume load using accepted imaging methods (T2, T2 FLAIR, and T1 weighted imaging after Gd contrast administration) serves as a valuable tool for evaluating treatment effects, monitoring disease progression and assessing disease activity [1]. Simultaneously, many quantitative MRI techniques such as diffusion tensor imaging, magnetization transfer imaging, and multi-component relaxometry can provide unique information about myelin and axon status, not available with conventional MRI. However, their introduction into routine clinical practice to supplement the standard MS imaging protocol will inevitably lead to a significant increase in scan times. In this work, we present a method to accelerate MS imaging using advanced reconstruction such as compressed sensing [2]. Our approach is based on the fact that many changes of interest occurring during disease progression, such as new T2w or Gd+ lesions, are of localized nature, making serial images of a MS patient highly correlated. Therefore, a large part of the anatomical information already present in baseline images potentially can be used to reconstruct subsequently acquired images from undersampled data.