Julien Cohen-Adad1,
Wei Zhao2, Anne Louise Oaklander3, Merit Cudkowicz3,
Nazem Atassi3, Lawrence L. Wald2, 4
1Department
of Electrical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec,
Canada; 2A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging,
Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA,
United States; 3Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General
Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; 4Harvard-MIT Division of
Health Sciences and Technology, MIT, cambridge, MA, United States
Recent advances in 7T MRI of the spinal cord yield images of unprecedented quality, with immediate clinical applicability and potential for new scientific understanding. Here we present clinical case studies of 7T MRI applied to spinal cord injury and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. High spatial resolution (0.35 mm in-plane) enabled visualization of abnormalities previously unseen on the clinical scans, such as Wallerian degeneration in the injury case and degeneration of the corticospinal tracts in ALS, thus bringing relevant information to the diagnosis of the two patients.