Longitudinal positron emission tomography imaging for monitoring myelin repair in the spinal cord.

Objective: Novel therapeutic interventions aimed at myelin repair are now under development for neuroprotection as well as functional recovery of patients with multiple sclerosis. However, development of myelin repair therapy necessitates a noninvasive approach for measuring changes in myelin content in vivo in a quantitative fashion not yet possible using magnetic resonance imaging. For this reason, we developed a novel positron emission tomography (PET) probe, termed [11C]MeDAS, that is capable of longitudinally imaging central nervous system myelin content.