Abstract #0444

de Zwart J, Tovar-Moll F, Ikonomidou V, Bagnato F, van Gelderen P, McFarland H, Duyn J, Riva M, Ohayon J, Horovitz S

Brain tissue degeneration in multiple sclerosis (MS) is associated with changes in T1 and T2. Conventional T1 weighted imaging fails to visualize early changes in white matter, and doesn't characterize different degrees of damage. We applied a recently introduced Tissue Selective Imaging (TSI) technique to generate images of white matter, gray matter and cerebrospinal fluid of MS patients based on T1. Preliminary evaluation (n=6) suggests that the new technique has superior sensitivity over conventional ones, depicts early T1 changes in white matter, and allows characterization of lesions with large T1 values and damage sustained in later stages of MS.