Abstract #3767

On the Impact of QSM Pipeline Parameters on Brain Iron Outcomes

Fahad Salman^1,2, Niels P. Bergsland¹, Michael G. Dwyer^1,3, Bianca Weinstock-Guttman⁴, Robert Zivadinov^1,3, and Ferdinand Schweser^1,3

¹Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center, Department of Neurology at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, United States, ²Department of Biomedical Engineering, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, United States, ³Center for Biomedical Imaging, Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, United States, ⁴Jacobs Multiple Sclerosis Center, Department of Neurology, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, United States

Synopsis

Keywords: Multiple Sclerosis, Susceptibility, quantitative susceptibility mapping, multiple sclerosis, deep gray matter, iron concentration, thalamus

Motivation: Only two quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) studies so far observed increased susceptibility in the thalamus of people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS), while all others found lower.

Goal(s): Investigate whether discrepancies in reported thalamic iron levels in pwMS can be attributed to age differences in studies or variations in their QSM processing pipeline.

Approach: We replicated a previous study's QSM pipeline with matched cohorts and systematically varying the regularization parameters for background field removal and dipole inversion.

Results: We found that pwMS consistently exhibited lower thalamic susceptibility across all pipeline parameter settings.

Impact: Our findings suggest that neither younger age nor specific regularization parameter choices account for the discrepancies in the literature, and that QSM robustly detects disease-related effects independent of these parameter variations.

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