Abstract #0090

Linking macrostructural and microstructural damage in early MS: a geostatistical and diffusion MRI study

Carmen Tur¹, Robert Marschallinger^2,3, Ferran Prados^1,4, Sara Collorone¹, Daniel R Altmann^1,5, Sébastien Ourselin⁴, Claudia Angela Gandini Wheeler-Kingshott^1,6,7, and Olga Ciccarelli¹

¹Queen Square MS Centre. Neuroinflammation department. UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom, ²Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS, Salzburg University, Salzburg, Austria, ³Department of Neurology, Christian Doppler Medical Center, Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria, ⁴Translational Imaging Group, CMIC, Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, United Kingdom, ⁵Department of Medical Statistics, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London, London, United Kingdom, ⁶Department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, ⁷Brain MRI 3T Research Centre, C. Mondino National Neurological Institute, Pavia, Italy

Macroscopic white matter (WM) lesion volume has been extensively used to predict disability progression in multiple sclerosis (MS). However, currently used lesion-related metrics fail to capture the complexity of WM-lesion spatial distribution. Here we used geostatistics, an emerging approach to model spatial data projected onto a common coordinate space, to characterise the spatial distributional features of WM lesions of patients with their first MS attack, the clinical relevance of lesion distributional properties and their microstructural correlates, through diffusion MRI. We conclude that WM-lesion spatial distributional features reveal novel aspects of MS pathology, are clinically relevant and possess specific microstructural features.

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