Nikolaus Krebs1,2, Michaela Soellinger3,
Michael Scarpatetti4, Christian Langkammer1,3, Monika
Gloor5, Stefan Ropele3, Franz Fazekas3,
Kathrin Yen1, Eva Scheurer1
1Ludwig Boltzmann Institute
for Clinical-Forensic Imaging, Graz, Austria; 2Institute of
Forensic Medicine, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria; 3Department
of Neurology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria; 4Institute
of Pathology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria; 5Division
of Radiological Physics, University of Basel Hospital, Basel, Switzerland
Magnetization transfer imaging is being used in clinical medicine for the diagnosis of demyelination processes. Traumatic brain injury can induce similar microstructural changes. To investigate if magnetization transfer imaging could also be used for the detection of changes secondary to brain trauma the magnetization transfer ratio of postmortem brains was correlated with histological findings in subjects with and without brain trauma. A significant increase of magnetization transfer ratio in different white matter regions was observed in the trauma group, which correlated with histological thinning of myelin sheaths. The non-invasive detection of microstructural changes could improve clinical trauma assessment by MRI.