Although blood work and cerebrospinal fluid analysis are valuable to rule out other etiologies of a patient’s neurologic symptoms, MRI remains the imaging procedure of choice for helping to confirm diagnosis and monitoring of disease progression when correlated with symptomatic findings.
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) plaques have increased signal intensity on T2 (shown here), contrasted T1, and FLAIR. Noncontrasted T1-weighted imaging is less sensitive for the detection of MS lesions but can give an excellent assessment of the global cerebral atrophy present in advanced, chronic MS. Demyelinating lesions may sometimes mimic brain tumors because of associated edema and inflammation.
