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Double inversion recovery (DIR) imaging is used in multiple sclerosis (MS) clinical protocols to improve the detection of cortical and juxtacortical gray matter lesions by nulling confounding signals originating from the cerebrospinal fluid and white matter. Achieving a high isotropic spatial resolution, to depict the neocortex and its typically small lesions, is challenged by the reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) determined by multiple tissue signal nulling. Here, we evaluate both conventional and optimized DIR implementations to improve tissue contrast (TC), SNR, and MS lesion conspicuity.DIR images were obtained from MS patients and healthy controls using both conventional and prototype implementations featuring a T2-preparation module (T2P), to improve SNR and TC, as well as an image reconstruction routine with iterative denoising (ID). We obtained quantitative measures of SNR and TC, and evaluated the visibility of MS cortical, cervical cord, and optic nerve lesions in the different DIR images.DIR implementations adopting T2P and ID enabled improving the SNR and TC of conventional DIR. In MS patients, 34% of cortical, optic nerve, and cervical cord lesions were visible only in DIR images acquired with T2P, and not in conventional DIR images. In the studied cases, image reconstruction with ID did not improve lesion conspicuity.DIR with T2P should be preferred to conventional DIR imaging in protocols studying MS patients, as it improves SNR and TC and determines an improvement in cortical, optic nerve, and cervical cord lesion conspicuity.

BACKGROUND Head motion during brain structural MRI scans biases brain morphometry measurements but quantitative retrospective methods estimating head motion from structural MRI have not been evaluated. PURPOSE To verify the hypothesis that two metrics retrospectively computed from MR images: 1) average edge strength (AES, reduced with image blurring) and 2) entropy (ENT, increased with blurring and ringing artifacts) could be sensitive to in-scanner head motion during acquisition of T1 -weighted MR images. STUDY TYPE Retrospective. POPULATION/SUBJECTS/PHANTOM/SPECIMEN/ANIMAL MODEL In all, 83 healthy control (HC) and 120 Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. FIELD STRENGTH/SEQUENCE 3D magnetization-prepared rapid gradient-echo (MPRAGE) images at 3T. ASSESSMENT We 1) compared AES and ENT distribution between HC and PD; 2) evaluated the correlation between tremor score (TS) and AES (or ENT) in PD; and 3) investigated cortical regions showing an association between AES (or ENT) and local and network-level covariance measures of cortical thickness (CT), gray to white matter contrast (GWC) and gray matter density maps (GMx). STATISTICAL TESTS 1) Student's t-test. 2) Spearman's rank correlation. 3) General linear model and partial least square analysis. RESULTS AES, but not ENT, differentiated HC and PD (P = 0.02, HC median AES = 39.8, interquartile range = 9.8, PD median AES = 37.6, interquartile range = 8.1). In PD, AES correlated negatively with TS (ρ = -0.21, P = 0.02) and showed a significant relationship (|Z| >3, P

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE To determine whether lesion to activation distance (LAD) on presurgical blood-oxygen-level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and degree of white matter involvement by primary or metastatic brain lesions predict perioperative motor and language deficits. METHODS We retrospectively evaluated 76 patients with intra-axial brain lesions referred for presurgical fMRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). We measured expressive, receptive, global language and motor LAD and assessed degree of involvement of the corticospinal tract (CST) and the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). We performed a Wilcoxon rank-sum test to determine whether the LAD and the degree of CST/SLF involvement were statistically significantly different between patients with and without preoperative or postoperative neurological deficits. RESULTS In preoperatively symptomatic patients, motor and expressive language LAD were significantly lower (z = –3.78, P = .0002, and z = –2.51, P = .01, respectively) than in asymptomatic patients. No significant difference was noted in LAD between postoperative symptomatic and asymptomatic patients, except for a trend level effect for motor LAD (P = .07). The degree of CST involvement was significantly different between symptomatic and asymptomatic patients (z = 3.40, P = .0007 and z = 2.97, P = .003, respectively, for pre- and postoperative motor deficits).The degree of SLF involvement was significantly different between preoperatively (but not postoperatively) symptomatic and asymptomatic patients (z = 2.85, P = .004). CONCLUSION Presurgical motor and expressive language LAD as well as degree of tract involvement on DTI are predictive of preoperative but not postoperative deficits, except for CST DTI and (trend level) motor LAD; inability of language LAD to predict postoperative deficits suggests that preoperative fMRI is valuable to neurosurgeons in avoiding resection of eloquent cortex.

Purpose To evaluate how retrospective head motion correction strategies affect the estimation of scalar metrics commonly used in clinical diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies along with their across-session reproducibility errors. Materials and Methods Fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), radial diffusivity (RD), axial diffusivity (AD) and their respective across-session reproducibility errors were measured on a 4T test–retest dataset of healthy participants using five processing pipelines. These differed in: 1) the number of b0 volumes used for motion correction reference (one or five); 2) the estimations of the gradient matrix rotation (based on 6 or 12 degrees of freedom derived from coregistration); and 3) the software packages used (FSL or DTIPrep). Biases and reproducibility were evaluated in three regions of interest (ROIs) (bilateral arcuate fasciculi, cingula, and the corpus callosum) and also at the full brain level with tract based skeleton images. Results Preprocessing choices affected DTI measures and their reproducibility. The DTIPrep pipeline exhibited higher DTI metrics: FA/MD and AD (P

Purpose (i) to validate blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) breathhold cerebrovascular reactivity (BH CVR) mapping as an effective technique for potential detection of neurovascular uncoupling (NVU) in a cohort of patients with perirolandic low grade gliomas undergoing presurgical functional MRI (fMRI) for sensorimotor mapping, and (ii) to determine whether NVU potential, as assessed by BH CVR mapping, is prevalent in this tumor group. Materials and Methods We retrospectively evaluated 12 patients, with histological diagnosis of grade II glioma, who performed multiple motor tasks and a BH task. Sensorimotor activation maps and BH CVR maps were compared in two automatically defined regions of interest (ROIs), ipsilateral to the lesion (i.e., ipsilesional) and contralateral to the lesion (i.e., contralesional). Results Motor task mean T-value was significantly higher in the contralesional ROIs (6.00 ± 1.74 versus 4.34 ± 1.68; P = 0.00004) as well as the BH mean T-value (4.74 ± 2.30 versus 4.09 ± 2.50; P = 0.009). The number of active voxels was significantly higher in the contralesional ROIs (Z = 2.99; P = 0.03). Actual NVU prevalence was 75%. Conclusion Presurgical sensorimotor fMRI mapping can be affected by NVU-related false negative activation in low grade gliomas (76% of analyzed tasks). J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2014;40:383–390. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.