Application

  • Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system, causing a range of neurological symptoms and impairments. Predicting the local microstructural changes and biomarkers in MS patients is difficult using current practice.
  • Myelin water imaging methods are advanced neuroimaging techniques that allow for the visualization and quantification of myelin content in the brain and are sensitive to MS demyelination processes, yet they are long and noisy measurements that are rarely used in the clinic. Besides demyelination, the available MRI methods are not sensitive to the myelin packing integrity which may change during inflammation.
  • qMRI is a rapidly growing field that provides an array of newly developed approaches for in-vivo measurements of physical units. The molecular abnormalities occurring in MS and other neurological diseases are not readily accessible by current imaging methods.

Our Innovation

A new MRI biomarker for myelination packing in order to visualize and quantify myelin content, integrity, or changes due to neurological conditions.

In healthy myelin, the water gap is constant and tight. But, in MS, this gap is larger due to the destruction of the membrane. In the demyelinating process, this gap will be large and in the remyelinating process, it will be smaller. Measuring the water gap thickness with MRI, which is a widely used tool in the diagnostics of people with MS, will be a great advantage as a biomarker of the myelination status.

Advantages

  • In-vivo measurement: While MRI is the primary tool for MS diagnostics, no in-vivo measurement with MRI has been developed before, and only measurement from postmortem patients were done using advanced microscopy technology.
  • Evaluation of a patient’s demyelination and remyelination processes via new MRI biomarkers for myelination packing integrity that were never measured before in-vivo or with MRI.
  • Our model relies on myelin water imaging and myelin content fraction from other quantitative MRI measurements and allows characterization of the size of the water gap between the myelin, that testifies about the advance of the disease.

Opportunity

This new method has the potential to make a decisive impact on understanding the pathophysiology of MS and providing specific in-vivo measures that could advance the development of new treatments.

Identification of new in-vivo biomarkers for demyelination and remyelination, as well as biomarkers of CNS inflammation, has important applications in the clinical management of MS, aging, and other WM diseases.