Grant: Project Grant

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the leading causes of disability in young adulthood. To help clinicians find the best treatment for a patient, it is important to know how many lesions they have, and where these lesions are located. While MRI is the best non-invasive tool to "see" those lesions in the brain and spinal cord of patients, MRI systems used in clinics (1.5 to 3 tesla (T)) often miss lesions, which could lead to an inadequate treatment. New, more powerful MRI systems featuring 7T enable clinicians to see finer, sub-millimetric details of the anatomy, and to better detect even the tiniest MS lesions. However, to date, there is no commercial coil that covers both the brain and the spinal cord on these 7T MRI machines. MRI coils are specialized devices that transmit and receive radiofrequency signals during a scan, playing a critical role in acquiring high-quality images of the body's internal structures. This study aims to develop a 7T MRI head-spine acquisition framework to improve the detection of lesions in people with MS. In particular, we plan to design and build a unique head-neck coil for a 7T system. This coil will have the capability to modulate, in real time, the magnetic field to compensate for artefacts in the images caused by the participant's respiration. This unique technology will produce unprecedented image quality at high resolution, thereby providing a clearer picture of lesions in the brain and spinal cord of people with MS. The expected outcome is a groundbreaking technology that will benefit not only people with MS, but will also have broader clinical applications related to the central nervous system, such as traumatic injuries and stroke.