ACTRIMS 2022 | The influence of gadolinium-based contrast agents on atrophy measurements in MS

Ingrid Lie, PhD Student, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway, talks about a study investigating the effect of gadolinium-based contrast agents on automated brain atrophy measurements in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). The study objective was to determine whether reliable brain atrophy measures could be obtained from post-contrast 3D T1-weighted images in patients with MS using FreeSurfer, a brain imaging software package. Although the absolute values were systematically different between pre- and post-contrast images, the consistency between values was good to excellent assessed by intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). These results suggest that it may be feasible to extract reliable brain atrophy measurements from T1-weighted images acquired after administration of gadolinium-based contrast agents. This interview took place at the ACTRIMS Forum 2022 in West Palm Beach, Florida.