Nature Reviews Neurology Research Highlights feature MIG work (Grussu F et al, ACTN 2017)

The highlight, which is authored by Dr Mitesh Patel and which will appear in the October 2017 issue, summarises recent results published by a joint UCL-University of Oxford venture in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology (available online since august 2017). 

The team, led by Professors Claudia Gandini-Wheeler Kingshott (UCL), Gabriele C. DeLuca (Oxford) and Daniel Alexander (UCL), investigates neurite orientation dispersion, namely the variability of axon and dendrite orientations, in the multiple sclerosis spinal cord. Findings demonstrate that neurite dispersion carries the signature of multiple sclerosis pathology and could therefore be a new useful biomarker. Also, the metric could be clinically relevant, since the team shows that a clinically viable MRI technique known as NODDI provides histological meaningful indices of neurite dispersion. NODDI can be already set up in clinical systems, and future work will assess whether NODDI-derived dispersion can improve the accuracy of current prognosis and be useful for treatment monitoring in multiple sclerosis. 

The Research Highlight is available here:http://www.nature.com/nrneurol/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nrneurol.2017.127.html

The original article of Grussu F et al in ACTN is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acn3.445/full