Brain scans predict which criminals are more likely to reoffend

In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner.

Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the non-profit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his collaborators studied a group of 96 male prisoners just before their release. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the prisoners’ brains during computer tasks in which subjects had to make quick decisions and inhibit impulsive reactions.

The scans focused on activity in a section of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a small region in the front of the brain involved in motor control and executive functioning. The researchers then followed the ex-convicts for four years to see how they fared.

Among the subjects of the study, men who had lower ACC activity during the quick-decision tasks were more likely to be arrested again after getting out of prison, even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors such as age, drug and alcohol abuse and psychopathic traits. Men who were in the lower half of the ACC activity ranking had a 2.6-fold higher rate of rearrest for all crimes and a 4.3-fold higher rate for nonviolent crimes. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There is growing interest in using neuroimaging to predict specific behaviour, says Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He says that studies such as this one, which tie brain imaging to concrete clinical outcomes, “provide a new and so far very promising way” to find patterns of brain activity that have broader implications for society.

But the authors themselves stress that much more work is needed to prove that the technique is reliable and consistent, and that it is likely to flag only the truly high-risk felons and leave the low-risk ones alone. “This isn’t ready for prime time,” says Kiehl.

Wager adds that the part of the ACC examined in this study “is one of the most frequently activated areas in the human brain across all kinds of tasks and psychological states”. Low ACC activity could have a variety of causes — impulsivity, caffeine use, vascular health, low motivation or better neural efficiency — and not all of these are necessarily related to criminal behaviour.

Crime prediction was the subject of Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report” (adapted for the silver screen by Steven Spielberg in 2002), which highlighted the thorny ethics of arresting people for crimes they had yet to commit.

Brain scans are of course a far cry from the clairvoyants featured in that science-fiction story. But even if the science turns out to be reliable, the legal and social implications remain to be explored, the authors warn. Perhaps the most appropriate use for neurobiological markers would be for helping to make low-stakes decisions, such as which rehabilitation treatment to assign a prisoner, rather than high-stakes ones such as sentencing or releasing on parole.

“A treatment of [these clinical neuroimaging studies] that is either too glibly enthusiastic or over-critical,” Wager says, “will be damaging for this emerging science in the long run.”

Alterations in brain activity in children at risk of schizophrenia predate onset of symptoms

Research from the University of North Carolina has shown that children at risk of developing schizophrenia have brains that function differently than those not at risk.

Brain scans of children who have parents or siblings with the illness reveal a neural circuitry that is hyperactivated or stressed by tasks that peers with no family history of the illness seem to handle with ease.

Because these differences in brain functioning appear before neuropsychiatric symptoms such as trouble focusing, paranoid beliefs, or hallucinations, the scientists believe that the finding could point to early warning signs or “vulnerability markers” for schizophrenia.

“The downside is saying that anyone with a first degree relative with schizophrenia is doomed. Instead, we want to use our findings to identify those individuals with differences in brain function that indicate they are particularly vulnerable, so we can intervene to minimize that risk,” said senior study author Aysenil Belger, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine.

The UNC study, published online on March 6, 2013, in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, is one of the first to look for alterations in brain activity associated with mental illness in individuals as young as nine years of age.

Individuals who have a first degree family member with schizophrenia have an 8-fold to 12-fold increased risk of developing the disease. However, there is no way of knowing for certain who will become schizophrenic until symptoms arise and a diagnosis is reached. Some of the earliest signs of schizophrenia are a decline in verbal memory, IQ, and other mental functions, which researchers believe stem from an inefficiency in cortical processing – the brain’s waning ability to tackle complex tasks.

In this study, Belger and her colleagues sought to identify what if any functional changes occur in the brains of adolescents at high risk of developing schizophrenia. She performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 42 children and adolescents ages 9 to 18, half of which had relatives with schizophrenia and half of which did not. Study participants each spent an hour and a half playing a game where they had to identify a specific image – a simple circle – out of a lineup of emotionally evocative images, such as cute or scary animals. At the same time, the MRI machine scanned for changes in brain activity associated with each target detection task.

Belger found that the circuitry involved in emotion and higher order decision making was hyperactivated in individuals with a family history of schizophrenia, suggesting that the task was stressing out these areas of the brain in the study subjects.

“This finding shows that these regions are not activating normally,” she says. “We think that this hyperactivation eventually damages these specific areas in the brain to the point that they become hypoactivated in patients, meaning that when the brain is asked to go into high gear it no longer can.”

Belger is currently exploring what kind of role stress plays in the changing mental capacity of adolescents at high risk of developing schizophrenia. Though only a fraction of these individuals will be diagnosed with schizophrenia, Belger thinks it is important to pinpoint the most vulnerable people early to explore interventions that may stave off the mental illness.

“It may be as simple as understanding that people are different in how they cope with stress,” says Belger. “Teaching strategies to handle stress could make these individuals less vulnerable to not just schizophrenia but also other neuropsychiatric disorders.”

First neutron scattering experiments on brain tissue reveal weaknesses in formaldehyde preservation, reducing reliability of post-mortem analysis

These results are the first step in a project to push back the limits of  existing dMRI imaging technology, to improve diagnosis and investigate potential treatments for brain diseases.

The first analysis of biological processes within brain tissue using neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin has revealed that the common application of formaldehyde preservatives changes, rather than maintains, fundamental properties such as rates of water diffusion. The mapping of cellular water in the brain is a key factor in the post-mortem analysis of several brain pathologies (including tumours and multiple sclerosis), with a view to earlier diagnosis and potential treatment. These results suggest the need for a review of existing research in this area.

The results are the first stage in the team’s own pioneering application of neutrons to understand in unprecedented detail the movement of cellular water within brain tissue. The analysis of this movement is generally performed by diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI), and provides the basis for diagnosing several brain diseases. These first results clearly demonstrate neutrons’ ability to ‘see’ the effects of these biological processes on a scale 10,000 times smaller than dMRI. In future ILL’s neutrons will analyse with unprecedented resolution cellular water dynamics in ex-vivo pathology-bearing brain tissue samples, thus helping doctors spot the early signs of these diseases and investigate potential treatments.

Cellular water is the major constituent of our body and its content may vary in brain regions depending on their specific composition. Water plays a key role in cell regulation, and its distribution and movement is an accurate indicator of cellular structure; this is because it interacts with different tissue components such as membranes and nerve fibres.

dMRI and other imaging techniques use water diffusion as a contrast method for revealing and characterising several brain pathologies (i.e. ischemia, tumours and, recently, inherited prion disease) on the micron scale 100 times thinner than a human hair. At this scale, however, the contribution of the macromolecular components cannot be separated and have to be averaged out instead.

As the standard imaging techniques used to detect the early signs of brain pathologies are limited in resolution, the use of preservation techniques to investigate pathological conditions in ex-vivo specimens has increased. However, there are concerns over the impact of these preservation processes on our tissues’ fundamental structural and compositional properties, and this has undermined confidence in this line of research.

To address these concerns Dr Francesca Natali from the Italian CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), in collaboration with Dr Yuri Gerelli, a scientist from the Institut Laue-Langevin, the world’s flagship centre for neutron science, Prof. J. Peters from France’s Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble (UJF), and Dr Calogero Stelletta from the University of Padova in Italy compared the behaviour of cellular water in ex-vivo bovine tissue preserved using two common preservation techniques: chemical fixation, using formaldehyde solutions, and cryo-preservation, where cells or whole tissues are cooled to sub-zero temperatures.

The researchers obtained fresh post-mortem bovine brains from an Italian slaughter-house and applied the different preservation techniques. These samples were then investigated using incoherent quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS) on the high-resolution IN5 spectrometer at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL).

Neutrons are an ideal probe for the investigation of biological materials at the atomic scale. As they produce no damaging radiation effects, they can accurately map any change in the samples over time.

From this analysis Dr Francesca Natali and her colleagues identified a significant reduction of water movement as a result of the introduction of the formaldehyde-based preservation solutions (potentially due to the formation of cross-links between proteins, within which free water may become trapped, reducing its mobility). This effect was not seen in the samples that underwent cryo-preservation.

As well as these findings, the results of this study also demonstrate for the first time the power of neutrons to model cellular water diffusion within brain tissue; this new modeling technique could help dMRI specialists push back the limits of existing imaging technology, to improve their diagnoses and investigate potential treatments for brain pathologies.

In a separate study, the same team are investigating how the movement and distribution of cellular water in brain tissue is affected by myelin, an electrical insulator that forms protective layers known as sheaths around brain cell axons. Myelin is responsible for speeding up electrical impulses as they travel along tissue fibres. Many neurodegenerative autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, are caused by the degradation of myelin over time. The neutron scattering team’s new understanding of the impact on research results of preservation techniques will enhance its atomic-scale investigations into the conditions underlying autoimmune diseases and the potential for treatment.

Path Found to a Combined MRI and CT Scanner

A technology that better targets an X-ray imager’s field of view could allow various medical imaging technologies to be integrated into one. This could produce sharper, real-time pictures from inside the human body, says a researcher who hopes to one day build such a unified imager.


Ge Wang, the director of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Biomedical Imaging Center, in Troy, N.Y., calls his vision omni-tomography. Mixing and matching imaging techniques, such as computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and single-photon emission computed tomography, could improve biomedical research and facilitate personalized medicine, says Wang, an IEEE Fellow.


To fit these imaging methods together, Wang and his collaborators have been developing a technology called interior tomography. In standard CT, X‑rays pass through two-dimensional slices of the body, and then a computer processes the data to build up a picture. If the scanner is trying to image the aorta, for instance, it will X-ray a whole section of the chest, including the points where the body ends and the open air begins. That boundary provides the image-building algorithm with defined edges and the background information it needs to operate. But interior tomography focuses only on structures inside the body, which reduces the patient’s radiation exposure. “If you’re only interested in the heart, why bother to cover your whole chest with X-rays?” says Wang.

Narrowing the view, however, eliminates the usual reference points needed to create an image conventionally. Interior tomography relies on a different set of hints. The new technique uses information about how substances within the body (such as blood) and air pockets alter X-rays to provide the algorithm with a base for reconstructing the image. It can even use old X-ray images of the same patient to help out.

Focusing on a specific region has advantages, particularly with patients too big for conventional scanners. “If an object is wider than the X-ray beam width, classic theory says you cannot do an accurate reconstruction,” says Wang. That’s not a concern with interior tomography, he says.

What’s more, Wang’s team has shown that this concept can be generalized for use in imaging methods other than CT scanning, including MRI. And that could lead to a true fusion of major medical imaging techniques. In part that’s because the technique allows the use of smaller X-ray detectors, which in turn makes it possible to fit more scanners into the same machine. 


There are already systems that combine two imaging methods—PET and CT or SPECT and CT, for instance. But those systems usually apply different methods in sequence rather than simultaneously, making it harder to see biological processes in action. The combination of CT and MRI has never been attempted before, but Wang says it’s possible now.


In fact, he and his collaborators in Australia, China, and the United States recently came up with a top-level engineering design for a CT-MRI scanner. They hope to present their design in June at the International Meeting on Fully Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, in California. Applying interior tomography to MRI imaging allows the use of a weaker magnetic field, which is one way the design compensates for the incompatibility between powerful magnets in the MRI and rotating metal parts in the CT scanner. 


Wang’s team does not yet have the funding to build a combination CT-MRI scanner, but putting the two technologies together could prove useful. MRI gives high contrast and allows doctors to measure functional and even molecular changes; CT provides greater structural detail. Together, they might allow doctors to get a superior picture of processes in action, such as changes during a heart attack, or serve as a guide to a surgical procedure. The technology would be ideal for imaging vulnerable plaques, suggests Michael Vannier, one of Wang’s collaborators and a radiology professor at the University of Chicago. Vulnerable plaques are buildups on artery walls that are particularly unstable and prone to causing heart attack or stroke. A combination of structural, functional, and molecular information is needed to tell just how dangerous the plaque may be. “In the long run, we think putting many imaging modes together will give you more information,” Wang says.


Interior tomography “is certainly an interesting concept that takes the interest in combining modalities to the ‘ultimate’ level of a single device,” says Simon Cherry, director of the Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging at the University of California, Davis. While omni-tomography is technically feasible, Cherry wonders whether it will make sense from a clinical and economic perspective. “There are some that say too many of our health-care dollars are spent on imaging, especially in the pursuit of defensive medicine. This will be an expensive machine,” he says. “These are the issues that may well determine whether this approach is successful.” 


Multiple Sclerosis research: the thalamus moves into the spotlight

A growing body of research by multiple sclerosis (MS) investigators at the University at Buffalo and international partners is providing powerful new evidence that the brain’s gray matter reflects important changes in the disease that could allow clinicians to diagnose earlier and to better monitor and predict how the disease will progress.

Over the past three years, the UB researchers and their partners around the world, supported by an active fellowship program at UB’s Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center (BNAC), have published journal papers and given presentations demonstrating that the thalamus region, in particular, is key to a host of issues involving MS.

“The thalamus is providing us with a new window on MS,” says Robert Zivadinov, MD, PhD, UB professor of neurology, BNAC director and leader of the research team. “In our recent studies, we have used large datasets to investigate the evolution of atrophy of the thalamus and its association with clinical impairment in MS, starting with the earliest stages of the disease. The location of the thalamus in the brain, its unique function and its vulnerability to changes wrought by the disease make the thalamus a critical barometer of the damage that MS causes to the brain.”

Zivadinov and UB professor of neurology Ralph Benedict discuss the new research in a video.

At the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology today, Zivadinov will discuss a study he performed in collaboration with colleagues from Charles University in Prague. The study found that atrophy of the thalamus, determined with MRI, can help identify which patients with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS), a patient’s first episode of MS, are at risk for developing clinically definite MS. Such a tool would be immensely helpful to clinicians, Zivadinov notes.

“This study, which included more than 200 patients, shows that thalamic atrophy is one of the most important predictors of clinically definite MS,” says Dana Horakova, MD, PhD, the principal investigator at Charles University.

“Therefore, based on these findings, we think MRI should be used to determine which patients are at highest risk for a second attack,” explains Zivadinov.

Difficulty in Recognizing Faces in Autism Linked to Performance in a Group of Neurons

Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) have discovered a brain anomaly that explains why some people diagnosed with autism cannot easily recognize faces — a deficit linked to the impairments in social interactions considered to be the hallmark of the disorder.

They also say that the novel neuroimaging analysis technique they developed to arrive at this finding is likely to help link behavioral deficits to differences at the neural level in a range of neurological disorders.

The final manuscript published March 15 in the online journal NeuroImage: Clinical, the scientists say that in the brains of many individuals with autism, neurons in the brain area that processes faces (the fusiform face area, or FFA) are too broadly “tuned” to finely discriminate between facial features of different people. They made this discovery using a form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that scans output from the blueberry-sized FFA, located behind the right ear.

“When your brain is processing faces, you want neurons to respond selectively so that each is picking up a different aspect of individual faces. The neurons need to be finely tuned to understand what is dissimilar from one face to another,” says the study’s senior investigator, Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience at GUMC.

“What we found in our 15 adult participants with autism is that in those with more severe behavioral deficits, the neurons are more broadly tuned, so that one face looks more like another, as compared with the fine tuning seen in the FFA of typical adults,” he says.

“And we found evidence that reduced selectivity in FFA neurons corresponded to greater behavioral deficits in everyday face recognition in our participants. This makes sense. If your neurons cannot tell different faces apart, it makes it more difficult to tell who is talking to you or understand the facial expressions that are conveyed, which limits social interaction.”

Riesenhuber adds that there is huge variation in the ability of individuals diagnosed with autism to discriminate faces, and that some autistic people have no problem with facial recognition.

“But for those that do have this challenge, it can have substantial ramifications — some researchers believe deficits in face processing are at the root of social dysfunction in autism,” he says.

The neural basis for face processing

Neuroscientists have used traditional fMRI studies in the past to probe the neural bases of behavioral differences in people with autism, but these studies have produced conflicting results, says Riesenhuber.  “The fundamental problem with traditional fMRI techniques is that they can tell which parts of the brain become active during face processing, but they are poor at directly measuring neuronal selectivity,” he says, “and it is this neuronal selectivity that predicts face processing performance, as shown in our previous studies.”

To test their hypothesis that differences in neuronal selectivity in the FFA are foundational to differences in face processing abilities in autism, Riesenhuber and the study’s lead author, neuroscientist Xiong Jiang, PhD, developed a novel brain imaging analysis technique, termed local regional heterogeneity, to estimate neuronal selectivity.

“Local regional heterogeneity, or Hcorr, as we called it, is based on the idea that neurons that have similar selectivities will on average show similar responses, whereas neurons that like different stimuli will respond differently,” says Jiang. “This means that individuals with face processing deficits should show more homogeneous activity in their FFA than individuals with more typical face recognition abilities.”

They tested the method in 15 adults with autism and 15 adults without the disorder. The autistic participants also underwent a standard assessment of social/behavioral functioning.

The researchers found that in each autistic participant, behavioral ability to tell faces apart was tightly linked to levels of tuning specificity in the right FFA as estimated with Hcorr. This finding was confirmed by another advanced imaging technique, fMRI rapid adaptation, shown by the group in previous work to be a good estimator of neuronal selectivity.

“Compared to the more well-established fMRI-rapid adaptation technique, Hcorr has several significant advantages,” says Jiang. “Hcorr is more sensitive and can estimate neuronal selectivity as well as fMRI rapid adaptation, but with much shorter scans, and Hcorr can even estimate neuronal selectivity using data from resting state scans, thus making the technique suitable even for individuals that cannot perform complicated tasks in the scanner, such as low-functioning autistic adults, or young children.”

“The study suggests that, just as in typical adults, the FFA remains the key region responsible for face processing and that changes in neuronal selectivity in this area are foundational to the variability in face processing abilities found in autism. Our study identifies a clear target for intervention,” says Riesenhuber. Indeed, after the study was completed, the researchers successfully attempted to improve facial recognition skills in an autistic participant. They showed the participant pairs of faces that were very dissimilar at first, but became increasingly similar, and found that FFA tuning improved along with behavioral ability to tell the faces apart. “This suggests high-level brain areas may still be somewhat plastic in adulthood,” says Riesenhuber.

The Brain Activity Map

Researchers explain the goals and structure of a new brain-mapping project

A proposed effort to map brain activity on a large scale, expected to be announced by the White House later this month, could help neuroscientists understand the origins of cognition, perception, and other phenomena. These brain activities haven’t been well understood to date, in part because they arise from the interaction of large sets of neurons whose coördinated efforts scientists cannot currently track.

“There are all kinds of remarkable tools to study the microscopic world of individual cells,” says John Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown and a participant in the project. “And on the macroscopic end, we have tools like MRI and EEG that tell us about the function of the brain and its structure, but at a low resolution. There is a gap in the middle. We need to record many, many neurons exactly as they operate with temporal precision and in large areas,” he says.

An article published Thursday in Science online expands the project’s already ambitious goals beyond just recording the activity of all individual neurons in a brain circuit simultaneously. Researchers should also find ways to manipulate the neurons within those circuits and understand circuit function through new methods of data analysis and modeling, the authors write.

Understanding how neurons communicate with one another across large regions of the brain will be critical to understanding how the brain works, according to participants in the project. Other efforts to map out the physical connections in the brain are already under way (see “TR10: Connectomics” and “Mapping the Brain on a Massive Scale”), but these projects look at static brains or can only get a rough view of how regions of the brain communicate. The new project will probably start applying its novel and yet unknown technologies on simpler brains, such as those of flies, and will probably take decades to achieve its goals.

Numerous leaders from the fields of neuroscience, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology are expected to collaborate on the effort. “We need something large scale to try to build tools for the future,” says Rafael Yuste, a neurobiologist at Columbia University and a member of the project. “We view ourselves as tool builders. I think we could provide to the scientific community the methods that could be used for the next stage in neuroscience.”

In addition to deepening fundamental understanding of the brain, the project may also lead to new treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders. “If we truly understand how things like thoughts, cognition, and other features of the brain emerge, then we should have a better understanding of mood disorders, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and other conditions that are thought to arise from brain-wide circuitry problems,” says Donoghue.

Details about which technology ideas will be given the green light and how much money will support their development are expected to be revealed in the White House announcement that is still to come. The project is likely to be supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and private foundations, participants say. It’s not yet clear how much money will be needed or which technologies will be given priority.

Whichever particular technologies emerge, nanotechnology is likely to be involved, in part because of the need for smaller and faster sensors to record neuronal activity across the brain. Existing sensors can record the electrical activity of neurons, but these chips can typically monitor fewer than 100 neurons at a time and can’t record activity from neighboring neurons, which would be necessary to understand how neurons interact with one another. Paul Weiss, director of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, a participant in the project, says that nanofabrication techniques could address this problem, with smaller chips bearing smaller electrical and even chemical probes. “We’ve had over a decade a fairly substantial investment in science and technology to develop the capability … to control how what we make interacts with the chemical, physical, and biological worlds,” he says.

Novel optical techniques could also aid the mapping project. Currently, many research groups use calcium-sensitive fluorescent dyes to study neuron firing, but Yuste wants to develop an optical technique that uses voltage-sensitive fluorescent dyes for a faster readout. “Neurons communicate using voltage,” he says. “We would like to develop voltage imaging so we will be able to measure neuronal activity directly.”

While many things about the project are uncertain, one thing is clear—there is going to be a lot of data to store, share, and analyze. “We have just begun to scratch the surface of how you deal with data in high-dimensional spaces,” says Terry Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute. “If you are talking about one million neurons, no one can even imagine what that looks like–it is way beyond what we can perceive in three dimensions.”

The Science article also sketches out a rough time line. Within five years, it should be possible to monitor tens of thousands of neurons; in 15 years, one million neurons should be possible. A fly’s brain has about 100,000 neurons, a mouse’s about 75 million, and a human’s about 85 billion. “With one million neurons, scientists will be able to evaluate the function of the entire brain of the zebrafish or several areas from the cerebral cortex of the mouse,” the authors write.

Low incidence of venous insufficiency in MS

Results of a study using several imaging methods showed that CCSVI (chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency) occurs at a low rate in both people with multiple sclerosis (MS) and non-MS volunteers, contrary to some previous studies. The research by an interdisciplinary team at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) was published in a recent early online edition of the Annals of Neurology.

“Our results in this phase of the study suggest that findings in the major veins that drain the brain consistent with CCSVI are uncommon in individuals with MS and quite similar to those found in our non-MS volunteers,” said Jerry Wolinsky, M.D., principal investigator and the Bartels Family and Opal C. Rankin Professor of Neurology at The UTHealth Medical School. “This makes it very unlikely that CCSVI could be the cause of MS, or contribute in an important manner to how the disease can worsen over time.” Wolinsky is also a member of the faculty of The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston and director of the UTHealth MS Research Group.

CCSVI has been described by Italian neurosurgeon Paolo Zamboni, M.D., as a new disorder in which veins draining the central nervous system are abnormal. Zamboni’s published research linked CCSVI to MS. Not all researchers have been able to duplicate his results.

UTHealth was one of three institutions in the United States to receive an initial grant to study CCSVI in multiple sclerosis (MS). The grant was part of a $2.3 million joint commitment from the National MS Society and the MS Society of Canada.

The UTHealth team tested several imaging methods including ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging with an intravenous contrast agent, and direct radiologic investigation of the major veins by direct injection of veins with radio-opaque contrast. The goal was to validate a consistent, reliable diagnostic approach for CCSVI, determine whether CCSVI was specific to MS and if CCSVI contributed to disease activity.

The team was blinded to the participant’s diagnosis throughout the study. Doppler ultrasound was used to investigate venous drainage in 276 people with and without MS. Using the criteria described by Zamboni for the diagnosis of CCVSI, UTHealth researchers found less prevalence of CCVSI than in some previous studies and no statistical difference between those with MS and those without MS.  Detailed experience with the other imaging approaches are being readied for publication.

Multiple sclerosis is an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system, interrupting the flow of information within the brain and from the brain to the body. It affects more than 400,000 people in the United States and 2.1 million in the world.