Evaluation of white matter tissue integrity from COVID-19 recovered patients using diffusion weighted imaging

Abstract

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The pandemic rapidly took over the world at the beginning of 2020. Millions of people were and are being infected all over the world. There have been reports on the long-term effects of COVID-19, and the neurological effects are denominated as neurocovid. This work aims to assess the neurocovid manifestations. To investigate these effects, magnetic resonance images were taken from COVID-19-recovered patients to detect mi- crostructural changes in the brain’s white matter integrity. This was achieved by using diffusion- weighted imaging techniques, which allow the detection of microstructural changes in white matter integrity. Previous work had reported significant changes in the white matter and gray matter of the brain using DWI techniques to compare the COVID-19 recovered patients. Diffusion tensor imaging technique was used to obtain some of its metrics, such as ap- parent diffusion coefficient and fractional anisotropy. However, higher-order models were applied to deal with the crossing fibers problem. Therefore, fixel-based analysis and diffusion kurtosis imaging techniques were used. Differences in specific brain regions were presented in the univariate and adjusted sta- tistical analysis. The testing was also done to determine clinical features, where there were significant differences in intubation, comorbidities, and critical severity of the disease.