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Abstract #1719

Resolving the anatomic variability of the human cervical spinal cord: a solution to facilitate advanced neural imaging.

David W. Cadotte 1,2 , Adam Cadotte 3 , Julien Cohen-Adad 4 , David Fleet 5 , Micha Livne 5 , David Mikulis 6 , and Michael G. Fehlings 1,7

1 Neurosurgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2 University Health Network, Toronto Western Reserach Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada, 3 CREMS program, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 4 Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique de Montral, Quebec, Canada, 5 Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, ON, Canada, 6 Department of Medical Imaging, Division of Neuroradiology, University of Toronto, ON, Canada, 7 University Health Network, Toronto Western Reserach Institute, ON, Canada

In this work we provide a novel, quantitative solution to deal with the anatomical variability of the human cervical cord. To do this, we identify the longitudinal axis of the brainstem-spinal cord with a polynomial spline function. Based on user-defined markings of segmental nerve rootlets as ground truth data, we identify the position of spinal segments relative to the ponto-medullary junction (PMJ). For the first time, we report a population distribution of the segmental anatomy of the cervical spine that has direct implications for the interpretation of advanced imaging studies most often conducted across groups of subjects.

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