Automated Detection of White-matter and Cortical Lesions in MP2RAGE at Ultra-High Field using a Single Scan

Ultra-high-field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (7T MRI) has been shown to be a valuable tool to assess focal and diffuse pathology in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, both in grey- and in white-matter. In this work, we developed and evaluated a method to automatically assess MS lesion load using magnetization-prepared two inversion-contrast rapid gradient-echo (MP2RAGE) MRI at 7T. The validation was conducted in a cohort of twenty MS patients from two research centers through a ground truth based on manual segmentations performed by a radiologist. Our single-sequence segmentation accurately detects visible white-matter and cortical lesions