"BOSTON—MRI scanners can map a person's innards in exquisite detail, but they say little about composition. Now, physicists are pushing MRI to a new realm of sensitivity to trace specific biomolecules in tissues, a capability that could aid in diagnosing Alzheimer's and other diseases. The advance springs not from improved scanners, but from better methods to solve a notoriously difficult math problem and extract information already latent in MRI data."

"Similarly, neurologists have long known that MS patients develop brain lesions in which myelin is lost. Using the new scans, Kolind has found that some MS patients lose myelin elsewhere in the brain, too, suggesting the loss precedes the lesions. Deoni and colleagues are studying myelin in 1200 healthy children over time to see how it develops with age. The data suggest social factors such as wealth can also lead to differences in myelination, Deoni says."
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/clever-math-enables-mri-map-molecules-implicated-multiple-sclerosis-other-diseases?utm_campaign=news_daily_2019-03-20&et_rid=99137423&et_cid=2725816

New techniques wring subtle signals from data already produced by scanners