Quantitative MRI protocol and decision model for a ‘one stop shop’ early-stage Parkinsonism diagnosis: Study design

Abstract

Differentiating among early-stage parkinsonisms is a challenge in clinical practice. Quantitative MRI can aid the diagnostic process, but studies with singular MRI techniques have had limited success thus far. Our objective is to develop a multi-modal MRI method for this purpose. In this review we describe existing methods and present a dedicated quantitative MRI protocol, a decision model and a study design to validate our approach ahead of a pilot study. We present example imaging data from patients and a healthy control, which resemble related literature.

Keywords

• Atypical parkinsonisms
• Parkinson
• PSP
• MSA
• Quantitative MRI
• Multi-modal