Structural Differences in OCB-/+ Patients with Clinically Isolated Syndrome Suggestive of MS

Yasheng Chen¹, Valerie Jewells¹, Danielle Speer², Taylor Stone¹, Silva Markovic-Plese², Hongyu An¹, Hongtu Zhu³, Dinggang Shen¹, Weili Lin¹

This work is aimed to detect brain structural differences between patients of clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) suggestive of multiple sclerosis with and without the presentation of Oligoclonal bands (OCB) in CSF. With both diffusion tensor imaging and T1 based tissue density map, we found that OCB+ patients have significantly abnormal DTI parameters and white matter tissue density loss in both corpus callosum and frontal white matter. Our findings suggest that OCB+ may have a worse brain abnormality than OCB- patients at their initial clinical presentation.