Abstract #3662

Improving spatial normalization of functional MRI data of the spinal cord using cerebrospinal fluid segmentation

Benjamin De Leener^1,2, Linda Soltrand Dahlberg², Ali Khatibi^2,3, Nawal Kinany^2,4, and Julien Doyon²

¹Department of computer engineering and software engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, ²Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, ³Center of Precision Rehabilitation for Spinal Pain (CPR Spine), University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, ⁴Center for Neuroprosthetics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Analyzing functional MRI of the spinal cord is challenging due to large susceptibility artifacts and inter-subject variability in terms of shape and curvature. More particularly, the poor contrast between the spinal cord and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leads to co-registration errors when analyzing the spinal cord functional activity at the group level. This study proposes a new registration framework that leverages the contrast between the CSF and its surrounding structure. Results show an increase of 67% in the number of active voxels at the group level, with an increase of 5% and 23% for the mean and max z-score, respectively.

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