Association of Quantitative and Functional Imaging With Clinical Outcome After Spinal Cord Injury

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Injury of the spinal cord, for instance induced by trauma, is complex involving primary mechanisms caused by forces directly affecting the spinal cord and secondary mechanisms consisting of complex physiological processes after trauma. Conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the current sta...

Injury of the spinal cord, for instance induced by trauma, is complex involving primary mechanisms caused by forces directly affecting the spinal cord and secondary mechanisms consisting of complex physiological processes after trauma. Conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the current standard to assess morphologic changes of the spinal cord after injury. However, conventional MRI provides little information regarding the health and integrity of the brain and spinal cord tissue itself, due to the fact that signal intensity changes are non-specific and do not correspond directly with physiological processes. This is reflected in the poor correlation of conventional MRI data with neurological and functional impairment in various spinal cord pathologies (such as multiple sclerosis compression myelopathy) and failure to provide reliable prognostic information. By applying a combination of diffusion weighted imaging, functional MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy will give us a better understanding of the changes after injury of the cervical spinal cord, brainstem and brain. Correlating the imaging data with the neurological and clinical status of patients could improve the patient status prediction and therapy planning. This study is divided into three sub-projects: i) Reproducibility study of the MR measurements in healthy controls ii) Progression of MR biomarkers in subacute patients with SCI and comparison to chronic patients with SCI iii) Prediction of clinical outcome based on MR biomarkers

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