Publications by authors named "Nico Papinutto"
Incorporation of the central vein sign into the McDonald criteria.
Mult Scler Relat Disord
November 2024
Article Synopsis
Background And Purpose: Paramagnetic rim lesions (PRLs) are an MRI biomarker of chronic inflammation in people with multiple sclerosis (MS). PRLs may aid in the diagnosis and prognosis of MS. However, manual identification of PRLs is time-consuming and prone to poor interrater reliability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: Spinal cord (SC) cross-sectional areas (CSAs) assessed with MRI have proven to be extremely valuable imaging markers in several diseases. Among the challenges is the delineation of vertebral levels to determine level-dependent changes in cord atrophy. With this study, we aimed to (1) test the hypothesis that there is proportionality in the position of the first six intervertebral discs and the length of the upper portion of the SC and (2) show that a proportionality approach can simplify the CSA assessment across vertebrae offering good reliability.
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- The central vein sign (CVS) is a proposed biomarker for diagnosing multiple sclerosis (MS) but traditional manual ratings for assessing CVS lesions can be slow and inconsistent.
- This study compared an automated CVS detection method to manual rating in 86 participants being evaluated for MS using 3T MRI scans.
- Results showed the automated method had a similar effectiveness in distinguishing MS patients from non-patients as the manual methods, with an area under the curve (AUC) ranging between 0.78 and 0.89, depending on the method used.
Article Synopsis
- The study evaluates the effectiveness of simplified imaging methods (central vein sign or CVS) compared to cerebrospinal fluid oligoclonal bands (OCB) as diagnostic tools for multiple sclerosis (MS).
- Results indicate that both methods have similar sensitivity and specificity, with a higher positive predictive value (PPV) for the CVS method after 12 months.
- Further research is planned to determine if CVS can replace or work alongside OCB for diagnosing MS.
Article Synopsis
- Clinical research typically requires careful study designs that account for variables like sex and age, but often overlooks body size factors like height and weight in neuroimaging studies.
- This study analyzed data from 267 healthy adults to explore how body height and weight relate to various brain and spinal cord MRI metrics, finding significant correlations, especially with brain gray matter volume and cervical spinal cord area.
- The results suggest that body size is an important biological variable that should be included in clinical neuroimaging study designs to enhance accuracy in understanding brain and spinal cord structures.
Article Synopsis
- The study evaluated a simplified method for assessing the central vein sign (CVS) in patients potentially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) using MRI scans.
- It analyzed 78 participants, with 47% diagnosed with MS, and found the simplified scoring method had a good diagnostic performance (AUROC of 0.83) and consistent inter-rater reliability.
- The results indicated that this easier approach can effectively identify CVS-positive lesions, which may improve the diagnosis of MS in clinical settings.
Myelin repair is an unrealized therapeutic goal in the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS). Uncertainty remains about the optimal techniques for assessing therapeutic efficacy and imaging biomarkers are required to measure and corroborate myelin restoration. We analyzed myelin water fraction imaging from ReBUILD, a double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled (delayed treatment) remyelination trial, that showed a significant reduction in VEP latency in patients with MS.
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- * Researchers analyzed gray and white matter changes in the cervical spinal cord of 44 ALS patients and found that at the early stage (King's stage 1), atrophy was primarily in gray matter, while later stages involved both gray and white matter.
- * A model suggested that significant gray matter atrophy occurs 7 to 20 months before clinical symptoms appear, indicating that spinal cord MRI could be a valuable tool for monitoring ALS progression.
Background: Remote activity monitoring has the potential to evaluate real-world, motor function, and disability at home. The relationships of daily physical activity with spinal cord white matter and gray matter (GM) areas, multiple sclerosis (MS) disability and leg function, are unknown.
Objective: Evaluate the association of structural central nervous system pathology with ambulatory disability.
Background And Objectives: The timing of neurodegeneration in multiple sclerosis (MS) remains unclear. It is critical to understand the dynamics of neuroaxonal loss if we hope to prevent or forestall permanent disability in MS. We therefore used a deeply phenotyped longitudinal cohort to assess and compare rates of neurodegeneration in retina and brain throughout the MS disease course.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe central vein sign (CVS) is a proposed MRI biomarker of multiple sclerosis (MS). The impact of gadolinium-based contrast agent (GBCA) administration on CVS evaluation remains poorly investigated. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of GBCA use on CVS detection and on the diagnostic performance of the CVS for MS using a 3-T FLAIR* sequence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: The North American Imaging in Multiple Sclerosis (NAIMS) multisite project identified interscanner reproducibility issues with T1-based whole brain volume (WBV). Lateral ventricular volume (LVV) acquired on T2-fluid-attenuated inverse recovery (FLAIR) scans has been proposed as a robust proxy measure. Therefore, we sought to determine the relative magnitude of scanner-induced T2-FLAIR-based LVV and T1-based WBV measurement errors in relation to clinically meaningful changes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The ability to assess brain and cord atrophy simultaneously would improve the efficiency of MRI to track disease evolution.
Objective: To test a promising tool to simultaneously map the regional distribution of atrophy in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients across the brain and cord.
Methods: Voxel-based morphometry combined with a statistical parametric mapping probabilistic brain-spinal cord (SPM-BSC) template was applied to standard T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans covering the brain and cervical cord from 37 MS patients and 20 healthy controls (HC).
Article Synopsis
- A new standardized quantitative MRI protocol for spinal cord imaging, called the spine generic protocol, has been developed to be used with 3T MRI systems from major manufacturers like GE, Philips, and Siemens.
- The protocol includes specific imaging techniques for evaluating spinal cord macrostructure and microstructure, such as T1 and T2-weighted imaging to determine cross-sectional areas and diffusion-weighted imaging for white matter assessment.
- An open-access document detailing the protocol is available online, providing a useful resource for researchers and clinicians aiming to enhance spinal cord imaging in neuroimaging practices.
Article Synopsis
- - The paper by Cohen-Adad et al. introduces a standardized MRI protocol for evaluating spinal cord integrity, tested across 19 and 42 centers for single and multi-subject datasets respectively, involving a total of 260 participants.
- - The datasets are openly available online, allowing researchers to access valuable data for analysis using tools like the Spinal Cord Toolbox, which produces normative values and statistics on variability across sites and manufacturers.
- - The protocol demonstrated high reproducibility with less than 5% variation across different sites and manufacturers, aiming to enhance the accessibility and reliability of quantitative MRI assessments in spinal research.
No single neuroimaging technique or sequence is capable of reflecting the functional deficits manifest in MS. Given the interest in imaging biomarkers for short- to medium-term studies, we aimed to assess which imaging metrics might best represent functional impairment for monitoring in clinical trials. Given the complexity of functional impairment in MS, however, it is useful to isolate a particular functionally relevant pathway to understand the relationship between imaging and neurological function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: Neurological and neurodegenerative diseases can affect the spinal cord (SC) of pediatric patients. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows for in vivo quantification of SC atrophy via cross-sectional area (CSA). The study of CSA values in the general population is important to disentangle disease-related changes from intersubject variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: Neurosurgical resection is one of the few opportunities researchers have to image the human brain pre- and postfocal damage. A major challenge associated with brains undergoing surgical resection is that they often do not fit brain templates most image-processing methodologies are based on. Manual intervention is required to reconcile the pathology, requiring time investment and introducing reproducibility concerns, and extreme cases must be excluded.
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