Abstract #2972

Characterization of brain structure and perfusion in patients with systemic sclerosis by magnetic resonance imaging

Xinyu Tong¹, Huilin He², Shihan Xu², Rui Shen³, Xingyu Zhou², Zihan Ning³, Ning Xu³, Jiachen Liu³, Shuwan Yu³, Zuo-Xiang He¹, Dong Xu², and Xihai Zhao³

¹School of Clinical Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, ²Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China, ³Center for Biomedical Imaging Research, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Synopsis

Keywords: Multiple Sclerosis, Perfusion, systemic sclerosis

Motivation: Cerebral involvement in systemic sclerosis (SSc) was reported increasingly but lacks evidence of specific imaging biomarkers.

Goal(s): To characterize cerebral structure and perfusion in SSc patients using MR imaging.

Approach: Brain structure and perfusion were characterized using T1w and pCASL MR sequences. The regional volume and cerebral blood flow (CBF) and voxel-wise CBF differences were compared between healthy volunteers, diffuse cutaneous (dcSSc) and limited cutaneous of SSc (lcSSc) patients.

Results: The SSc patients showed significantly lower voxel-wize CBF than healthy volunteers, and the dcSSc patients showed significantly lower CBF in both region-wise and voxel-wise level than the lcSSc patients.

Impact: Our study demonstrates the regional-wise and voxel-wise cerebral blood flow decrease in SSc patients, which might provide the new insights into the central nervous system involvement and related clinical manifestations in SSc.

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