A research team including MSI PI Christophe Lenglet (associate professor, Radiology; Center for Magnetic Resonance Research) has received grants from the Food and Drug Administration and the State of Minnesota Office of Higher Education to continue research into developing a reliable method of assessing changes in patients with amyotophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in order to evaluate different treatments. The PI for the project is Assistant Professor Parmod Pisharady (CMRR); Professor Lenglet and Professor David Walk (Neurology) are co-PIs. The University of Florida and Northwestern University are also sites for the study.

The research group has published a paper on their results so far: Pramod Kumar Pisharady, Lynn E. Eberly, Isaac M. Adanyeguh, Georgios Manousakis, Gaurav Guliani, David Walk. Christophe Lenglet. Multimodal MRI improves diagnostic accuracy and sensitivity to longitudinal change in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Communications Medicine 3: 84 (2023). doi: 10.1038/s43856-023-00318-5. A story about the research can be found on the Medical School’s website: ALS imaging research at U of M Medical School attracts $3M for a multicenter study to demonstrate clinical trial readiness of MRI biomarkers.

Professor Lenglet is developing computational methods for the analysis of MRI data, particularly diffusion MRI, and is using resources at MSI for this work.