Donghoon Lee1,
Joshua Park1, Jacqueline Wicki2, Jeffrey Chamberlain2,
Sue Knoblaugh3, Julie Randolph-Habecker3
1Radiology,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States; 2Neurology,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States; 3Fred
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, United States
Muscular dystrophy is a group of inherited myogenic disorders with no cure. MRI has some key methods that can potentially provide valuable information in developing effective treatment methods for the deadly disease. Unfortunately, only a limited ability of MRI has been utilized to study muscular dystrophy. Here we performed multi-parametric MRI to evaluate treatment responses for mdx (murine model of muscular dystrophy) mice after adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector mediated gene therapy. Our results show T2, apparent diffusion coefficient and magnetization transfer ratio would be potential MR markers to evaluate the treatment efficacy.