Multiparametric Classification of Skin from Osteogenesis Imperfecta Patients and Controls by Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Microimaging

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the ability of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to discriminate between skin biopsies from individuals with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) and skin biopsies from individuals without OI. Skin biopsies from nine controls (unaffected) and nine OI patients were imaged to generate maps of five separate MR parameters, T(1), T(2), k(m), MTR and ADC. Parameter values were calculated over the dermal region and used for univariate and multiparametric classification analysis. A substantial degree of overlap of individual MR parameters was observed between control and OI groups, which limited the sensitivity and specificity of univariate classification. Classification accuracies ranging between 39% and 67% were found depending on the variable of investigation, with T(2) yielding the best accuracy of 67%. When several MR parameters were considered simultaneously in a multivariate analysis, the classification accuracies improved up to 89% for specific combinations, including the combination of T(2) and k(m). These results indicate that multiparametric classification by quantitative MRI is able to detect differences between the skin of OI patients and of unaffected individuals, which motivates further study of quantitative MRI for the clinical diagnosis of OI.