Silent MRI for monitoring MS

About the project

In MS your immune system attacks the myelin coating surrounding nerve fibres. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans can pick up these areas of damage, called lesions. Although this is extremely useful technology for diagnosing MS, it’s less useful in predicting how your MS will develop. Plus, the process of having an MRI scan is quite a long and noisy one.

This project aims to optimise a technique called Magnetisation Transfer Imaging (MTI) so that the process is much faster and much quieter. This is a type of MRI, but the technology is very sensitive to changes in the amount of myelin. It’s not yet routine though, and that’s probably because processing the images at the moment can take a long time. The idea of this project is to effectively make a new type of scan, by combining MTI with a way to make the scan very quiet, and with advanced image reconstruction methods to make the whole process quicker.

The project will involve developing the technology with MRI experts, testing it with volunteers, and making sure it works well to scan the spinal cords of people with MS, and not just people’s brains. The project will also involve testing this with some people with MS, and asking them if they preferred this new scan to the more traditional MRI scan, and also asking doctors to assess how useful the scan images are.

How will it help people with MS?

The team hope this new scan will be more pleasant than current scans (quicker and quieter). Plus, it would give doctors more information at the point of diagnosis about someone’s MS, which means they’re in a better position to make treatment decisions.

In addition, it may be that quicker scanning technology could itself lead to more frequent scans, which could help doctors understand more about how MS changes over time, and lead to better predictions and treatments at first diagnosis.

Longer term, the project could inform other studies looking to track MS-related changes in the brain and spinal cord after diagnosis and monitor the effects of treatment. And this information could help to better predict how MS is likely to progress.