Abstract #0972

Dwyer M, Abdelrahman N, Hussein S, Bergsland N, Yella V, Zivadinov R

While lesion volume is a useful metric for describing inflammatory disease burden in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), it fails to capture information about the spatial distribution of acute inflammatory activity. Metrics including spatial information may therefore be more relevant in terms of clinical disability. To investigate this possibility, we examined MRI scans from 301 patients with MS. We calculated measures of spatial standard deviation, moment of inertia, Frobenius norm, and centroid size. Except for spatial standard deviation, we found slightly better correlations between each of these measures and disability than that found for volume alone.