Caterina Mainero1,
Sindhuja T Govindarajan1, R. Philip Kinkel2, Allen S.
Nielsen2, Julien Cohen-Adad1, 3
1A.
A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital,
Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center, Boston, MA, United States; 3Department of
Electrical Engineering, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Ecole
Polytechnique de Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada
We combined T2* relaxation decay at 7 Tesla MRI with a surface-based laminar analysis, which allows for selective sampling of T2* at different depths from pial surface across the whole cortex, to investigate in vivo a gradient in the expression of cortical pathology in multiple sclerosis (MS), until now reported at post-mortem only. Our data show that in early MS cortical T2* changes are focal and mainly confined to the iuxtameningeal cortical layers. As MS progresses cortical changes involve deeper cortical laminae, and extend across multiple cortical areas. Future longitudinal studies are needed to confirm these preliminary observations.