The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is composed mainly of specialized endothelial cells characterized by the presence of intercellular tight junctions. Additionally, perivascular cells, astrocytes, and surrounding basement membranes determine BBB integrity. BBB disruption is an early phenomenon in the formation of new white matter multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions; however, knowledge of the extent of B...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The role of juxtacortical lesions in brain volume loss in multiple sclerosis has not been fully clarified. The aim of this study was to explore the role of juxtacortical lesions on cortical atrophy and to investigate whether the presence of juxtacortical lesions is related to local cortical thinning in the early stages of MS. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 131 patient...

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is the most frequent non-traumatic neurological disease capable of causing disability in young adults. Detection of MS lesions with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most common technique. However, manual interpretation of vast amounts of data is often tedious and error-prone. Furthermore, changes in lesions are often subtle and extremely unrepresentati...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is characterized by the formation of demyelinating lesions in the white matter (WM). However, the timecourse of the evolution of healthy white matter into fully demyelinated lesions in MS is not well understood. We use a recently proposed technique to examine magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) timecourses in lesions segmented from MTR images in patients with relapsing-re...

CONTEXT Hypointense lesions on T1-weighted spin-echo magnetic resonance images (T1 lesions) represent destructive multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions, consisting of axonal loss and matrix destruction. These lesions are being used as a secondary outcome measure in phase III clinical trials. Clinical determinants of T1 lesions may differ between subgroups of patients with MS and subsequently may have...

Recent findings in the animal model for multiple sclerosis (MS), experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, implicate a novel CD4+ T-cell subset (TH17), characterized by the secretion of interleukin-17 (IL-17), in disease pathogenesis. To elucidate its role in MS, brain tissues from patients with MS were compared to controls. We detected expression of IL-17 mRNA (by in situ hybridization) and p...

From the earliest descriptions of multiple sclerosis (MS), the venocentric characteristic of plaques was noted. Recently, numerous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have proposed this finding as a prospective biomarker for MS, which might aid in differentiating MS from other diseases with similar MRI findings. High-field MRI studies have shown that penetrating veins can be detected in mo...

This paper focuses on the segmentation and classification of multiple sclerosis lesions in magnetic resonance images. As MRI is the primary tool used in the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, there is substantial interest in developing an algorithm that will detect lesions from such images. We present a flexible framework in which segmentation and classification are integrated. We assume that we ...

INTRODUCTION Demyelinated axons in multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions have an increased energy demand in order to maintain conduction. However, oxidative stress-induced mitochondrial dysfunction likely alters glucose metabolism and consequently impairs neuronal function in MS. Imaging and pathological studies indicate that glucose metabolism is altered in MS, although the underlying mechanisms and...

Clinicians need to study the effects of new treatments: it is sometimes possible to detect and quantify those effects by looking at evolutions in the medical images of a patient over time especially in the case of multiple sclerosis (MS) where lesions are related to clinical signs [1]. Some methods allow to compare two images to know where there are differences, typically between the last and t...