Abstract #1679

Zaraiskaya T, Kumbhare D, Noseworthy M

Measurement of blood serum creatine kinase (CK) is a widely used biochemical test to grade/stage musculoskeletal pathology. This test suffers from lack of anatomical specificity and a brief diagnostic window as the CK level returns to normal well before healing is complete. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in particular, diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) has been successfully used to detect changes in pathological muscle tissue due to injury. The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the diffusion tensor provide information about local tissue anisotropy. In addition tissue fractional anisotropy (FA) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) may be calculated, which are provide reliable estimation of altered cellular geometry. In this study, we applied DT-MRI to temporally characterize structural changes associated with thigh muscle biopsy. These measurements were correlated with standard clinical measurement of serum CK.