Notably, water content asymmetry in the posterior putamen correlates with motor asymmetry (MDS-UPDRS III).
This links a non-invasive MRI biomarker with a key behavioral hallmark of early PD.

We show that the putamen exhibits spatial gradients across several biophysical properties—water content, iron levels, and microstructural markers.
These gradients are altered in Parkinson’s, consistently pointing to the posterior putamen as a disease hotspot.

We collected a comprehensive multiparametric qMRI dataset in collaboration with Prof. Gilad Yahalom and the Shaare Zedek movement disorders clinic.
This goes beyond our previous clinical MRI work, offering richer insight into PD-related brain changes.

Excited to share our new work just published in @Nature_NPJ Parkinsons!
Led by my brilliant PhD student Elior Drori, we present a detailed look at brain microstructure in Parkinson’s using advanced quantitative MRI (qMRI).
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵

5/ And in cases where T2w images were unavailable (e.g., UK Biobank), we found that diffusion (B0) data can serve as an effective replacement.

4/ Adapting to Missing Data: When PDw images were unavailable (e.g., HCP), we optimized the T1w/T2w approach.

3/ Our Approach: Using simple mathematical operations derived from the signal equations (e.g., T1w/PDw, ln(T2w/PDw)), we present a method to approximate R1 & R2 values from weighted MRI. We validated this approach with synthetic, phantom, and human clinical datasets.