Tracing your lesions through the MR Myelinoscope - news from the imaging department

Longitudinal Observation of Individual Multiple Sclerosis White Matter Lesions Using Quantitative Myelin Imaging
Kitzler HH, Köhler C, Wahl H, Eisele JC, Deoni SC; Rutt BK, Ziemssen T, Linn J. 
Poster # 1282, 24th annual meeting of ISMRM

One of you recently asked the question whether lesions on MRI can disappear, and I said yes they can, and that this has to do with several factors including lesion severity (lots of axonal loss or not), subsequent lesion repair, and the tools & techniques used to detect them (or not).  Now I just returned from Singapore after attending the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), where I saw this work using an MRI technique optimised for detecting the myelin content in lesions (let's call it an "MR Myelinoscope").  It nicely shows that whilst lesions may look the same on our standard workhorse MRI, they may be quite in different "states" when looking through the MR Myelinoscope.

The panel above shows that over 12 months lesions on FLAIR (standard workhorse technique, top row) don't change very much, however the Myelinoscope (bottom row) shows dynamic change over time (see arrows): A lesion hardly visible at month 0 is largest at month 3 (demyelination), and then smaller (suggesting remyelination).



Panel showing 4 different lesion "states" (differences in myelination status over 12 months) using the MR Myelinoscope whilst standard FLAIR doesn't change.

Nice work indicating how crude our current standard MRI techniques are in monitoring the severity and dynamics of tissue changes within MS lesions.

Whilst the MR Myelinoscope technique is quite complex to implement, and therefore not available at many centres, it could be useful in trials of potentially remyelinating drugs where only a limited number of centres would be involved.

CoI: none