New Concepts Related to Disease Appreciation in Multiple Sclerosis

In the past several decades, MRI has become an indispensable tool in the field of multiple sclerosis (MS) for clinicians and researchers. However, the MS field still faces several challenges. This review focuses on 2 current areas of difficulty: 1) discriminating MS from other diseases when the clinical history and imaging features are atypical or nonspecific, and 2) the lack of quantitative imaging metrics with which to follow MS patients over time in clinical practice. This review highlights promising MRI and postprocessing techniques that have potential applications in these areas. With further study, these tools could be usefully integrated into clinical care.