Monitoring spinal muscular atrophy with three-dimensional optoacoustic imaging

Challenges in neuromuscular disease assessment

Neuromuscular diseases (NMDs) encompass a large, diverse group of different diseases whose common leading symptoms are increasing and usually irreversible muscle weakness. Patients with genetic, degenerative NMDs face an extremely tough battle: the symptoms of these diseases are often life-threatening, and few effective treatments or objective methods to monitor disease progression are available.

An unmet need for improved NMD monitoring

For the hereditary NMD spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), recent advances in gene therapies have led to several treatments that are able to drastically slow the progression of the disease, increase survival rates, and significantly improve the quality of life for SMA patients. Effective treatment requires timely assessment of disease status, particularly because treatment response to each therapy is variable between different patients. However, the current gold standard approaches employed to assess SMA status are functional tests and clinical scores – both of which can be subjective, may require patient compliance and may require long timelines to detect changes in disease status. New clinical approaches that enable early, accurate and objective detection of disease progression and therapy response may enable better optimization of patient care.

Three-dimensional MSOT for SMA assessment

In a study recently published by University Hospital Erlangen, clinical researchers explored the use of three-dimensional optoacoustic imaging with Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography (MSOT) to assess disease status and therapeutic effects in SMA patients. This work builds on numerous prior studies demonstrating the utility of two-dimensional MSOT, with the objective to further improve visualization and signal quantification.

Utilizing MSOT to non-invasively visualize muscle tissue and assess therapy response in SMA patients.

In this study, pediatric patients with SMA and age-matched healthy volunteers were assessed using MSOT as well as the current gold standards of functional tests and clinical scores. Measurements with both two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional MSOT correlated well with clinical scores. Moreover, the increased sensitivity from three-dimensional volumetric data enabled not only differentiation between SMA patients and healthy volunteers, but also between treated and non-treated SMA patients.

Three-dimensional volume of visualized tissue, enabling assessment of numerous anatomical features.

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