A new technique for using MRI scanners that can deliver a faster diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) in the brain has been successfully tested in the UK.
While MRI scans have been used as a diagnostic tool to detect white matter lesions in the brain, they are not always indicative of the disease.
But researchers at the University of Nottingham and Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, England, say they have now found a way to use clinical MRI that can distinguish between MS lesions and other brain white spots.
Dr Nikos Evangelou, who led the study, and his team used a T2-weighted imaging process, which can reveal lesions in the brain’s white matter that are centred on a vein.
The study, published in the latest edition of Multiple Sclerosis Journal, examined 40 patients from the trust’s neurology outpatients’ department and used a test cohort of 10 MS patients and 10 patients with non-MS white brain matter lesions were scanned.
Anonymised scans were analysed blinded to clinical data and simple diagnostic rules were devised. The same rules were applied to a validation cohort of 20 patients – 13 of whom had MS and seven who had other lesions.
Within the test cohort, all patients with MS had central veins in more than 45% of brain lesions, while the rest had central veins visible in less than 45% of lesions.
After the team applied the same diagnostic rules to the second cohort, all the remaining patients were correctly categorised into MS or non-MS in under two minutes per scan.
“We already knew that large research MRI scanners could detect the proportion of lesions with a vein in the brain’s white matter, but these scanners are not clinically available,” said Dr Evangelou.
“So we wanted to find out whether a single brain scan in an NHS hospital scanner could also be effective in distinguishing between patients known to have MS and patients known to have non-MS brain lesions. We are excited to reveal that our results show that clinical application of this technique could supplement existing diagnostic methods for MS.”
The team says this study is significant because of those people with suspected MS who are sent to treatment centres, fewer than half have the condition, which demonstrates that diagnosing MS in a significant minority of cases can be challenging.
The Nottingham University team aims to extend the study and hopes that in under two years, it will be able to see how accurate the new test is.
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