Lesion Features on Magnetic Resonance Imaging Discriminate Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2022

Publication Title

European Journal of Neurology

Abstract

Background Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides insight into various pathological processes in multiple sclerosis (MS) and may provide insight into patterns of damage among patients. Objective We sought to determine if MRI features have clinical discriminative power among a cohort of MS patients. Methods Ninety-six relapsing remitting and seven progressive MS patients underwent myelin water fraction (MWF) imaging and conventional MRI for cortical thickness and thalamic volume. Patients were clustered based on lesion level MRI features using an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA). Results One hundred and three patients with 1689 MS lesions were analyzed. PCA on MRI features demonstrated that lesion MWF and volume distributions (characterized by 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles) accounted for 87% of the total variability based on four principal components. The best hierarchical cluster confirmed two distinct patient clusters. The clustering features in order of importance were lesion median MWF, MWF 25th, MWF 75th, volume 75th percentiles, median individual lesion volume, total lesion volume, cortical thickness, and thalamic volume (all p values

Comments

This study was funded by the following grants: NIH/NINDS R01 NS104283, and the CTSC grant UL1 TR0002384

DOI

10.1111/ene.15067

Volume

29

Issue

1

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS