Although multiple sclerosis (MS) has been considered a white matter disease, MS lesions are known to occur in grey matter. Recent immunohistochemical studies have demonstrated extensive grey matter demyelination in chronic MS. The most common lesion type consists of purely cortical lesions extending inward from the surface of the brain, this lesion subgroup is grossly underestimated by standard...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) plays a significant role in the current characterization and diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) in radiological imaging. However, early detection of MS lesions from MRI still remains a challenging problem. In the present work, an information theoretic approach to cluster the voxels in MS lesions for automatic segmentation of lesions of various sizes in multi-c...

Recently, a new MRI technique was developed at 3 Tesla (T), called fluid attenuated inversion recovery* (FLAIR*). In this study, we implemented FLAIR* in an existing MS cohort at 7 T, to investigate whether we could corroborate results of previous 7T studies that introduced specific MS lesion characteristics. Furthermore, we aimed to investigate the meaning of these lesion characteristics by re...

INTRODUCTION The Blink Reflex Test (BRT) is a neurophysiological examination used for evaluation of brainstem reflex circuits. MRI is the most precise modality for evaluation of MS lesion anatomy. Our study objective was to investigate how the functional results of the neurophysiological BRT relate to the anatomy of MS lesions in routine MRI studies. METHODS 65 MS patients underwent the BRT w...

Beth Rapaport, MD Steven Karceski, MD WHAT WAS THE STUDY ABOUT? Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease of the CNS. The exact cause of MS is not known. However, this is a very active area of research. In MS, the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, causing areas of tissue damage, or lesions. Typically, the lesions are seen on MRI. In some instances, the lesions are “silent,” me...

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) lesions are known to change over time. The location, size and shape characteristics of lesions are often used to diagnose and to track disease progression. We have improved our lesion-browsing tool that allows users to automatically locate successive significant lesions in a MRI stack. In addition, an automatic alignment feature was implemented to facilitate comparisons ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Contrast enhancement on MR images of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) is known to be associated with abnormalities of the blood-brain barrier (BBB). However, little is known about diagnostic patterns and common features of enhanced MS lesions. This study was designed to evaluate initial enhancement patterns, changes in these enhancing patterns, and duration of enhanc...

Introduction Multiple sclerosis is generally thought of as a white matter (WM) disease [1], yet there is limited correlation between white matter lesion (WML) load and neurological deficits found clinically [2]. Cortical damage was identified early [3,4] and has recently been correlated with the neurological episodes of MS patients [5]. Pathologically, cortical lesions (CLs) are classified into...