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Subthalamic Nuclear Tissue Contrast in Inversion Recovery MRI Decreases with Age in Medically Refractory Parkinson's Disease
Author(s) -
Sarkar Subhendra N.,
Sarkar Pooja R.,
Papavassiliou Efstathios
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of neuroimaging
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1552-6569
pISSN - 1051-2284
DOI - 10.1111/jon.12111
Subject(s) - medicine , subthalamic nucleus , parkinson's disease , deep brain stimulation , rank correlation , contrast (vision) , magnetic resonance imaging , refractory (planetary science) , spearman's rank correlation coefficient , central nervous system disease , nuclear medicine , disease , radiology , pathology , surgery , statistics , physics , mathematics , machine learning , artificial intelligence , astrobiology , computer science
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE MRI appearance of subthalamic nucleus (STN) boundaries in Parkinson's patients is often unreliable and not well understood. An objective comparison between FSE T2 and inversion recovery (FSTIR) sequences for stereotactic placement of deep brain stimulators is presented to advance current understanding of STN tissue contrast for refractory Parkinson's disease (PD). METHODS We imaged 12 PD (age 53‐82) and 12 control patients (age 48‐77) using T2 and FSTIR sequences at 1.5T. To avoid MR contrast variation from hardware and patient dependent sources we used an internal thalamic tissue standard to normalize STN signal intensity and correlated it with patient age for these two groups. RESULTS Normalized FSTIR‐weighted STN contrast decreased with increasing age for PD patients (Spearman Rank correlation = −.5) while remained virtually unchanged for controls with age (Spearman Rank coefficient ≈0). T2‐weighted STN contrast did not show appreciable changes with age for both the groups (Spearman correlation ≈ −.1). CONCLUSIONS STN, a common stimulation target, shows an age dependent trend for normalized FSTIR MRI contrast. Although larger patient pools are needed, our work points to tissue relaxation‐based changes in STN that may provide insight in early stages of brain pathology involving DBS targets in medically refractory Parkinson's disease.