Abstract #2114

Diffusion Tensor Imaging of the Pediatric Thoracic Spinal Cord Using a Short Echo Time Inner-Field-Of-View Sequence

Devon Middleton¹, Feroze Mohamed¹, Nadia Barakat², Scott Faro¹, Pallav Shah¹, MJ Mulcahey², Amer Samdani², Jrgen Finsterbusch³

¹Radiology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, United States; ²Shriners Hospital for Children, Philadelphia, PA, United States; ³University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany

DTI of the pediatric spinal cord (SC) has the potential to provide useful information on white matter integrity and to serve as an important biomarker for spinal cord injury (SCI). This study examines the evaluate the efficacy of an inner-field-of-view DTI sequence for imaging of the thoracic spinal cord in pediatric subjects, both normal and with SCI. Good quality DTI images were successfully collected for six healthy subjects and two subjects with SCI and DTI indices were examined for both groups.