Synopses
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is believed to be the second most common neurodegenerative disease in developed countries. The pathogenesis of physiological changes in the brains of these patients is known to be the main differentiating factor between PD and other Parkinsonian disorders such as Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), Essential Tremor (ET) and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) to name a few. Through both qualitative and quantitative outputs, STAGE offers a comprehensive PD protocol to achieve this goal by visualizing key imaging biomarkers in major brain nuclei of these patients. STAGE technology uses rapid, 3D multi-echo GRE sequences to quantify the iron content in the deep gray matter structures, visualize neuromelanin in the midbrain as well as template-based automatic segmentation of all the main brain structures. These iron- and neuromelanin-sensitive STAGE outputs have been shown to help with in vivo detection of such abnormalities especially during the early stages of the disease as well as therapeutic purposes such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) patient selection in more advanced stages of the disease.
Clinical Research Publications
Automatic detection of neuromelanin and iron in the midbrain nuclei using a magnetic resonance imaging-based brain template
