Kyoko Fujimoto1,
Eve LoCastro2, Sneha N. Pandya2, Elizabeth Monohan1,
Ashish Raj2, Xiaobo Shen3, Thanh Nguyen2,
Susan A. Gauthier1
1Department
of Neurology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, United States; 2Department
of Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, United States; 3Department
of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States
A major hurdle to conducting clinical trials for remyelinating agents in multiple sclerosis is the lack of a clinically feasible imaging method to assess myelin content. T2 relaxometry is a magnetic resonance imaging technique in which the contribution of water associated with myelin can be represented as myelin water fraction (MWF). Here we introduce the technique to combine and analyze our whole brain MWF T2prep spiral gradient-echo sequence and our post-processing algorithm with FreeSufer WM segmentation and a semi-automated lesion mapping method. We were able to integrate lesion and MWF maps for the efficient comparison of WM and lesion MWF.