Menke Ricarda A, Scholz Jan, Miller Karla L, Deoni Sean, Jbabdi Saad, Matthews Paul M, Zarei Mojtaba
Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, University of Oxford, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford OX3 9DU, Oxford, UK.
Neuroimage. 2009 Aug 15;47(2):435-41. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.05.017. Epub 2009 May 15.
The substantia nigra contains dopaminergic cells that project to the striatum and are affected by the neurodegenerative process that appears in Parkinson's disease (PD). For accurate differential diagnosis and for disease monitoring the availability of a sensitive and non-invasive biomarker for Parkinson's disease would be essential. Although there has been notable progress in studying correlates of nigral degeneration by means of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the past decade, MRI and analysis techniques that allow accurate high-resolution mapping of the SN within a clinically acceptable acquisition time are still elusive. The main purpose of the preliminary study was to evaluate the potential role of the driven equilibrium single pulse observation of T1 (DESPOT1) method for delineation of the SN and differentiation of PD patients from healthy control subjects (n=10 in each group). We also investigated whether additional measures that can be obtained with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) can further improve the MRI-guided discrimination between PD patients and controls. Our results show that the DESPOT1 method allows for a clear visualisation of the SN as a whole. Volumetric comparisons between ten PD patients and ten healthy subjects revealed significantly smaller volumes in patients for both the left and the right sides when the whole SN was considered. Combining SN volumetry and its connectivity with the thalamus improved the classification sensitivity to 100% and specificity to 80% for PD (discriminant function analysis with leave-one-out cross validation). Combining DESPOT1 imaging and DTI could therefore serve as a diagnostic marker for idiopathic Parkinson's disease in the future.
黑质包含向纹状体投射的多巴胺能细胞，并受到帕金森病（PD）中出现的神经退行性过程的影响。对于准确的鉴别诊断和疾病监测，帕金森病敏感且非侵入性生物标志物的可用性至关重要。尽管在过去十年中通过磁共振成像（MRI）研究黑质变性的相关性取得了显著进展，但在临床可接受的采集时间内能够准确高分辨率绘制黑质的MRI及分析技术仍然难以实现。这项初步研究的主要目的是评估驱动平衡单脉冲T1观测（DESPOT1）方法在描绘黑质以及区分PD患者与健康对照受试者（每组n = 10）方面的潜在作用。我们还研究了扩散张量成像（DTI）可获得的其他测量指标是否能进一步提高MRI引导下区分PD患者与对照的能力。我们的结果表明，DESPOT1方法能够清晰地整体可视化黑质。对10例PD患者和10例健康受试者的体积比较显示，当考虑整个黑质时，患者左右两侧的体积均显著较小。将黑质体积测量及其与丘脑的连接性相结合，PD的分类敏感性提高到100%，特异性提高到80%（留一法交叉验证的判别函数分析）。因此，DESPOT1成像与DTI相结合未来可能作为特发性帕金森病的诊断标志物。
