Imaging

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can be used to obtain detailed images of the inside the body.

It is largely unexplored with muscle and nerve, and we believe that it has the potential to revolutionise the diagnosis and monitoring of neuromuscular disease in the same way that MRI has transformed our understanding and treatment of multiple sclerosis. 

Facilities

For patient studies, a new Siemens Trio (3 T) machine will become available. 

Challenges

We wish to use MRI technology to measure patterns of neuromuscular disease in humans such as atrophy, signal change, oedema and fatty degeneration of skeletal muscle as part of the primary disease or secondary to nerve pathology.

We will extend these studies to directly investigate nerves, and we wish to find out whether MRI is a sensitive method of detecting therapeutic changes. Finally, we will use MRI to study nerve and muscle biopsies from patients and animals.

MRI at Queen Square