Denervated muscle can be identified on MRI by hyperintense signals

denervated masseter muscle

The denervated masseter and temporalis muscle (arrowheads) and pterygoid muscles (arrows) show marked hyperintense signal in a patient who had a partial lesion of the trigeminal nerve follwing surgical removal of a carcinoma of the maxillary sinus.

Imaging

MRI can be ideally used to obtain identical measurements in animals and humans. While this technique as applied to muscle and nerve is largely unexplored we believe that it has the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and monitoring of neuromuscular disease in the same way as MRI has transformed our pathophysiological understanding and treatment of multiple sclerosis. For patient studies a new Siemens Trio (3 T) machine will become available whereas for studies of animals and tissue we will have access to a Varian 9.4 T machine with a 30 cm bore hole. This highfield instrument will be equipped with anaesthetic machine and there will be facilities to house rodents thus permitting repeated investigations on animals. We wish to use MRI technology to measure common denominators of neuromuscular disease in humans and animal models 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 to detect therapeutic changes. Finally we will use MRI to study nerve and muscle biopsies form patients and animals.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/neuromuscular-mri

MRI in the centre