News

Our lab’s work examining frequency shifts in the brain, specifically in white matter multiple sclerosis lesions, was featured on UBC’s website.

“This technique teases out the subtle differences in the development of MS lesions over time,” Rauscher says. “Because this technique is more sensitive to those changes, researchers could use much smaller studies to determine whether a treatment – such as a new drug – is slowing or even stopping the myelin breakdown.”

The paper by Wiggerman et al  was published in the journal Neurology.  We use MR frequency imaging, e.g. maps obtained from the phase signal of susceptibility-weighted gradient-echo image acquistions, for the investigation of tissue changes due to MS. In contrast to conventional MR images, such as T1 or T2, frequency shift imaging provides the possibility to quantify tissue changes and relate them to the pathology of MS. This is of interest in MS lesions, which are focal areas of damage appearing in the brain or spinal cord, but quantification of damage beyond the number of lesions observed or their size is of particular interest in MS as we know that diffuse pathology, that appears ‘normal’ on conventional MRI, is actually abnormal. More advanced imaging techniques, such as MR frequency shift imaging, are needed to describe this type of damage in MS.