Pain is a significant problem in diseases affecting the spinal cord, including demyelinating disease. To date, studies have examined the reliability of clinical measures for assessing and classifying the severity of spinal cord injury (SCI) and also to evaluate SCI-related pain. Most of this research has focused on adult populations and patients with traumatic injuries. Little research exists r...

BACKGROUND Patients with primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS) often develop severe disability despite low levels of abnormality on conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This may relate to diffuse pathological processes occurring in normal appearing brain tissue (NABT) involving both white matter (NAWM) and grey matter (NAGM). Magnetisation transfer imaging (MTI) is capable of ...

This article provides an overview of in vivo magnetic resonance (MR) imaging contrasts obtained for mammalian brain in relation to histological knowledge. Emphasis is paid to the (1) significance of high spatial resolution for the optimization of T1, T2, and magnetization transfer contrast, (2) use of exogenous extra- and intracellular contrast agents for validating endogenous contrast sources,...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The effect of comorbidities on disease severity in MS has not been extensively characterized. We determined the association of comorbidities with MR imaging disease severity outcomes in MS. MATERIALS AND METHODS Demographic and clinical history of 9 autoimmune comorbidities confirmed by retrospective chart review and quantitative MR imaging data were obtained in 815 pat...

Two general pathological processes contribute to multiple sclerosis (MS): acute inflammation and degeneration. While magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is highly sensitive in detecting abnormalities related to acute inflammation both clinically and in animal models of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), the correlation of these readouts with acute and future disabilities has been fou...

Magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) has been often used for imaging myelination. Despite its high sensitivity, the specificity of MTR to myelination is not high because tissues with no myelin such as muscle can also show high MTR. In this study, we propose a new magnetization transfer (MT) indicator, MT asymmetry (MTA), as a new method of myelin imaging. The experiments were performed on rat bra...

Introduction: Liver biopsy, which serves as the clinical standard for the detection and surveillance of liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, is an invasive procedure that is prone to sampling error and interobserver variability. Magnetization-transfer contrast (MTC) imaging employs off-resonance radio-frequency pulses to selectively pre-saturate signal from macromolecule-bound protons via chemical exc...