Commencing January 2025, Dr Heidi Beadnell, University of Sydney was awarded a Translational Research Project Grant which focuses on improving the clinical specificity of MRI scan abnormalities in patients living with MS.
Dr Beadnell and her team’s Translational Research Project is titled ‘Some MS lesions matter more than others: using advanced MRI to identify critical brain changes and inform treatment strategy’. Their project focuses on improving the clinical specificity of MRI scan abnormalities in patients with MS. By categorising areas of focal damage in the MS brain based on advanced imaging analysis, they seek to identify a subclass of MS lesion, referred to as ‘Tx Lesions’, that are better associated with clinical outcomes and can predict long-term disability progression. They hypothesise that Tx Lesions, which incorporate both spatial (location) and severity (nerve damage) information, will provide more clinically relevant information than conventional MRI changes. The newly developed tool will be validated on a large existing MRI dataset, and will facilitate more precise patient monitoring and treatment, ultimately preventing the accumulation of disability.
In terms of project progress to date, ethical approval for the project has been obtained and the MSBase and MSBase Imaging Repository (MSBIR) data requests approved. As such, all the clinical and imaging data required for the project has been located and data pre-processing is currently underway.
During the 2026 calendar year, a research associate with the specific technical skills to assist with the implementation of the Tx-lesion pipeline component of the project will be secured, the imaging data already collected to complete the development of the Tx-Lesion pipeline will be processed and analysed, the imaging data from MSBIR using the newly developed Tx-Lesion pipeline will be analysed, a large scale MSBase/MSBIR validation study to determine both clinical relevance and utility of TX-Lesion metrics, over and above existing lesion metrics, will be performed and completed. The project is on track to have some preliminary data available in 2026.
We look forward to learning of further progress with this important Translational Research Project, which is due for completion in December 2027.