Magnetic resonance neurography
peripheral nerve lesions
To detect peripheral nerve lesions and the microstructure integrity of the sciatic nerve, thirteen participants, of whom 6 were allocated to the M-Diet group and 7 to the FMD group, underwent high-resolution T2-weighted anatomical magnetic resonance neurography (MRN) with fat spectral saturation, T2-relaxometry and diffusion-tensor-imaging (DTI) of the right thigh in a 3.0 Tesla MRI scanner (Magnetom Prisma-Fit; Siemens Healthineers, Germany; 15-channel transmit–receive knee coil) at baseline and at the end of intervention after six months. Sciatic nerve’s fractional anisotropy (FA), commonly considered the most sensitive marker of nerve fiber integrity, was calculated automatically from the DTI dataset using the built-in algorithm. T2-timewas determined from the T2 relaxometry dataset using a custom-written MatLab routine based on monoexponential fitting procedure (R2020a, MathWorks Inc., Natwick, MA, USA) as reported previously (