I’ve been reading that in patients with MS, surrogate MRIs are used to determine therapy or disease progress, but what does that mean? Are they simply comparing MRI hyperintensities of people with more severe MS and extrapolating that onto other individuals with more recent MS diagnoses?
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An MRI cannot technically be used to diagnose MS or show its progress. But it can be used to see lesions which are associated with MS, so helps give an idea of how things are going.
Since they are not actual results on the the disease, they are ‘surrogate’ results
Checking clinical progression in MS is subjective and there are studies that propose to use MRI lesions progression as a surrogate indicator, either in clinical drug studies or clinical practice.