Table 1.
Summary of the previous most relevant studies showing DTI abnormalities in the grey matter in MS patients.
Table 2.
Demographic, clinical and MRI characteristics.
Table 3.
The Minimal Assessment of Cognitive Function in MS battery: cognitive domains, neuropsychological tests and component scores.
Figure 1.
MRI example of white matter lesions and the segmented deep grey matter structures.
Lesions and anatomical regions of interest are illustrated on a set of MR images from a 53 year-old male MS patient. Left – axial FLAIR; right – axial diffusivity map. The output of computer-assisted segmentation of the lesions is shown on FLAIR. The 3D models of the manually outlined caudate (green), putamen (blue) and thalamus (red) are overlaid on the fractional anisotropy map of a single section containing these structures.
Figure 2.
Boxplots showing the distributions of fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity values in the caudate, putamen and thalamus in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and controls.
The significant p-values for fractional anisotropy difference between the two groups are reported (general linear model, controlling for age and gender). Thick lines inside the boxes indicate the median value. The whiskers indicate the top and bottom quartiles. Circles are outliers. Fractional anisotropy is a scalar value between 0 and 1; Mean diffusivity is expressed in µm2/s.
Table 4.
DTI metrics of the deep grey matter structures.
Figure 3.
Scatterplots showing the observed significant correlations between fractional anisotropy (FA) of the three deep grey matter structures of interest and other variables of clinical relevance.
Caudate FA showed a positive correlation with the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS), Ambulation Index and depressive symptomatology as measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES-D). Putamen FA showed a positive correlation with White Matter (WM) Lesion Volume, as well as an inverse correlation with the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised (BVMT-R) Total Recall and Delayed Free Recall scores. Thalamus FA showed an inverse correlation with the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) and the California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II) Total Learning scores, as well as a positive correlation with the CES-D score.
Table 5.
Spearman's correlations between fractional anisotropy of the deep grey matter nuclei and neuropsychological status in the cognitively tested MS subgroup (n = 16).