The use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the research of clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) over the last 20 years & an assessment of the proportion of studies that included a radiologist.
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- Background: Clinically Isolated Syndrome (CIS) is the first clinical manifestation of MS and can reveal itself through several symptoms. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is undoubtedly the main imaging tool being used by scientists for the diagnosis and management of MS, and thus CIS. The scope of this systematic literature review therefore was to survey all the available literature in order to document the use, and the overall contribution, of MRI in the research of CIS through the last 20 years, as well as statistical aspects of this use. Moreover, this review attempted to record the participation of Radiologists in the studies and to evaluate the trend over time for more Radiologists being authors in CIS imaging studies.
- Methods: The search for CIS studies was conducted between the first days of October 2017 until the last days of November of the same year. Two well-known medical literature search engines, EMBASE and MEDLINE, were used for this purpose, and the search strategy was based on the search of various terms and free words around CIS, MS, etc. The criteria for the papers, for both the abstract and the full-text selections, were the investigation of CIS by the studies, the use of MRI for their research, and that they had to be published in the last 20 years (1997-2017). Manual-searching was also done.
- Results: The application of the search strategy through the two medical search engines gave totally 33075 results. Through the process of the selection of the appropriate studies, according to the abstract selection criteria, totally 1155 papers were chosen for the next phase. During the selection of papers according to the full text selection criteria, 352 papers were considered as eligible for inclusion into the final list of studies. Through the hand-searching totally 4 papers fulfilling the selection criteria were identified. The total number of papers in the list was 356 papers.
- Conclusion: The studies where the use of MRI is primary are dropping, while the ones where the reason is secondary are rising - The proportion of studies where a Radiologist is participating in is decreasing - The greater percentage of the studies was employing conventional type of MRI, and 1,5T MRI scanners, for the scanning of patients, and it had as objective the research of CIS, with the one investigating suspected CIS being significantly lower - MRI is a very useful and necessary method for the investigation of CIS and the evaluation of factors which indicate conversion to CDMS.
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