About

This interactive notebook is supplementary material to the scientific manuscipt “Longitudinal stability of brain and spinal cord quantitative MRI measures” (2023) as part of the Courtois project on neural modelling (CNeuroMod).

Abstract

Quantitative MRI (qMRI) promises better specificity, accuracy, and stability relative to its qualitative MRI counterpart used clinically. Despite the best efforts from experts, most qMRI techniques have not been adopted for clinical use or in longitudinal disease/therapeutic studies, because of widely reported reproducibility issues. Longitudinal stability is particularly important for qMRI so that it may quantify MR tissue properties during the progression of disease or therapeutic therapy that are probed by longitudinal clinical studies. In this work, we scanned the brain and cervical spinal cord of six participants at regular intervals over the course of three years (a total of ten sessions) using quantitative MRI imaging protocols, with a focus on T1, myelin imaging techniques (magnetization transfer) and diffusion MRI. We developed a set of pipelines to process the BIDS-formated data we collected, and shared a reproducible and interactive Jupyter Book of the analysed data. Intrasubject COVs were on the order of 0.6% to 2.3% for qMRI metrics in brain white matter over the course of three years, and 3.9% to 9.5% in the spinal cord. Intersubject COVs ranged from 0.4% to 3.5% in brain white matter, and from 4.0% to 8.4% in the spinal cord. SOMETHING DIFFUSION-WISE. Results from this work show the level of stability that can be expected from qMRI protocols in the brain and spinal cord, and could help in the design of future longitudinal clinical studies. This study is part of the Courtois NeuroMod project, the data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/courtois-neuromod.

Cite

To cite this article:

M. Boudreau, A. Karakuzu, A. Boré, B. Pinsard, K. Zelenkovski, E. Alonso-Ortiz, J. Boyle, P. Bellec, J. Cohen-Adad. Longitudinal stability of brain and spinal cord quantitative MRI measures. 2023 (in preparation)