Fluid and White Matter Suppression: New Sensitive 3 T Magnetic Resonance Imaging Contrasts for Cortical Lesion Detection in Multiple Sclerosis

In this study, we compared the manual detection rate of cortical lesions on MP2RAGEuni, FLAWSmin, and FLAWShco in MS patients. Furthermore, we assessed whether the combined detection rate on FLAWSmin and FLAWShco was superior to MP2RAGEuni for cortical lesions identification. Last, we compared quantitative T1 maps (qT1) provided by both MP2RAGE and FLAWS in MS lesions. Materials and Methods We included 30 relapsing-remitting MS patients who underwent MP2RAGE and FLAWS magnetic resonance imaging with isotropic spatial resolution of 1 mm at 3 T. Cortical lesions were manually segmented by consensus of 3 trained raters and classified as intracortical or leukocortical lesions on (1) MP2RAGE uniform/flat images, (2) FLAWSmin, and (3) FLAWShco. In addition, segmented lesions on FLAWSmin and FLAWShco were merged to produce a union lesion map (FLAWSmin + hco). Number and volume of all cortical, intracortical, and leukocortical lesions were compared among MP2RAGEuni, FLAWSmin, and FLAWShco using Friedman test and between MP2RAGEuni and FLAWSmin + hco using Wilcoxon signed rank test. The FLAWS T1 maps were then compared with the reference MP2RAGE T1 maps using relative differences in percentage. In an exploratory analysis, individual cortical lesion counts of the 3 raters were compared, and interrater variability was quantified using Fleiss ϰ. Results In total, 633 segmentations were made on the 3 contrasts, corresponding to 355 cortical lesions. The median number and vo...
Source: Investigative Radiology - Category: Radiology Tags: Original Articles Source Type: research