3D-Fast Gray Matter Acquisition with Phase Sensitive Inversion Recovery Magnetic Resonance Imaging at 3 Tesla: Application for detection of spinal cord lesions in patients with multiple sclerosis.

Abstract

Background and purposeTo compare 3D-Fast Gray Matter Acquisition with Phase Sensitive Inversion Recovery (3D-FGAPSIR) with conventional 3D-Short-Tau Inversion Recovery (3D-STIR) and sagittal T1-and T2-weighted MRI dataset at 3 Tesla when detecting MS spinal cord lesions.Material and methodsThis prospective single-center study was approved by an institutional review board and enrolled participants from December 2016 to August 2018. Two neuroradiologists blinded to all data, individually analyzed the 3D-FGAPSIR and the conventional datasets separately and in random order. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus by a third neuroradiologist. The primary judgment criterion was the number of MS spinal cord lesions. Secondary judgment criteria included lesion enhancement, lesion delineation, reader-reported confidence and lesion-to-cord-contrast-ratio. A Wilcoxon's test was used to compare the two datasets.Results51 participants were included. 3D-FGAPSIR detected significantly more lesions than the conventional dataset (344 versus 171 respectively, pConclusion3D-FGAPSIR improved overall MS spinal cord lesion detection as compared to conventional set and detected all enhancing lesions.