Study of Neuropsychiatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus with DTI and FAIR

Xiaozhen Li¹, Zhengguang Chen²

Conventional neuroimaging cannot help us either to differentiate between chronic and acute brain lesions or to improve in our understanding of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) pathogenesis because of the high probability of a Neuropsychiatric SLE (NPSLE) event. The fMRI including DTI, which demonstrates the tissue water mobility in brain tissue, and flow-sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR), which reveals the relative cerebral blood flow, may help to further assess the possible abnormality in neuronal and neural vascular reactivity in NPSLE. In this study we found in combination of ADC, FA, rCBF have high sensitivity in detecting earlier pathologic changes in NPSLE.