Regions of Reduced Cortical Magnetization Transfer Ratio Detected in MS Patients Using Surface-Based Techniques

Mishkin Derakhshan¹, Zografos Caramanos¹, Sridar Narayanan¹, Donald Louis Collins¹, Douglas Lorne Arnold¹

The multiple sclerosis imaging community still struggles with the in vivo detection of cortical grey matter lesions. In this abstract we quantified the extent of subpial decreases of magnetization transfer ratio of the cortical grey matter, which may indicate regions of cortical demyelination, in groups of MS patients and healthy controls. To increase our sensitivity, we exploited the knowledge gained from pathological studies of the unique geometry of these lesions, and carried out our analyses on two-dimensional parametric surface models of the cortex, instead of the three-dimensional voxel-wise analyses traditionally used.