Characterization of brain structure and perfusion in patients with systemic sclerosis by magnetic resonance imaging

Motivation: Cerebral involvement in systemic sclerosis (SSc) was reported increasingly but lacks evidence of specific imaging biomarkers. Goal(s): To characterize cerebral structure and perfusion in SSc patients using MR imaging. Approach: Brain structure and perfusion were characterized using T1w and pCASL MR sequences. The regional volume and cerebral blood flow (CBF) and voxel-wise CBF differences were compared between healthy volunteers, diffuse cutaneous (dcSSc) and limited cutaneous of SSc (lcSSc) patients. Results: The SSc patients showed significantly lower voxel-wize CBF than healthy volunteers, and the dcSSc patients showed significantly lower CBF in both region-wise and voxel-wise level than the lcSSc patients. Impact: Our study demonstrates the regional-wise and voxel-wise cerebral blood flow decrease in SSc patients, which might provide the new insights into the central nervous system involvement and related clinical manifestations in SSc.