Application of fMRI to the study of multiple sclerosis: an update

During the past decade, functional MRI studies in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) have consistently shown that the variable effectiveness of recovery mechanisms following disease-related tissue injury is one of the factors that might explain, at least partially, the paucity of the correlation between clinical and MRI findings in these patients. More recently, technical developments resulted in an improvement of acquisition and post-processing schemes that, in turn, allowed us to further characterize the functional and structural abnormalities of specific regions of the CNS, thus ameliorating the understanding of the mechanisms associated with the clinical manifestations and disability accumulation in MS. This review focuses on such recent achievements and provides an update of functional MRI studies of MS performed in the past few years.