Grant: Operating Grant

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating diseae typically beginning in young adulthood. The cause is unknown and there is no cure. magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides a way to visualize the MS brain and has been used for clinical diagnosis and research inMS for many years. However findings on MRI do not correlate with the actual physical symptoms of the patient. New MRI methods are needed, which is the focus of this application. Studies of extracted brain after death have shown that MS brains often have iron buildup and that many lesions are not seen on MRI. We introduce new MRI approaches to gain a greater understanding of MS in patients. The new methods focus on two main areas of MS that need further investigation: lesion detection, and brain iron content. The methods introduce a living iron "stain" to determine relative iron content,and a new "microscope" that enables visualization of previously invisible lesions. The new methods all require significant advances in MRI technical development by applying physics insight. An additional step forward is that all new methods are "quantitative" which means they supply an absolute measure that can be used to follow disease over time. Most of the methods are performed with a rare MRI system at strength 4.7 T, which is roughly 90,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. After all of the methods have been created and tested in normal volunteers, we apply the methods to a time course study of MS evolution in patients to gain new insight into the disease. This work is a collaborative effort between an MRI physicist, four MS neurologists, a neuroradiologist, two computer scientists and a statistician.