Abstract #3400

Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping of the “Swallow tail” in Parkinson disease

Santanu Chakraborty^1,2, Gerd Melkus^1,2, Fahad Essbaiheen^1,2,3, David A Grimes⁴, and Tiago Mestre⁴

¹Medical Imaging, The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, ON, Canada, ²Radiology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada, ³King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ⁴Neurology, The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Parkinson disease (PD) continues to be diagnosed based on clinical findings. Recently, in SWI images, the loss of ‘swallow tail’ appearance in dorsolateral substantia nigra in PD patients yielded high diagnostic accuracy. In our study we measured susceptibility values using QSM in the ‘swallow tail’ area in seven Parkinson’s disease patients and compared to five control subjects. The susceptibility in the swallow tail area was higher in the PD group (0.072 vs. 0.058). This likely suggests increased iron deposition causing a masking effect that contributes along with dopaminergic neurons loss to the disappearance of the ‘swallow tail’ in PD patients.

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