Abstract #0853

A Prospective Longitudinal Study in Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy Using Quantitative Microstructural MRI with Tract-Specific Metrics

Allan R. Martin¹, Benjamin De Leener², Izabela Aleksanderek¹, Julien Cohen-Adad², David W. Cadotte¹, Sukhvinder Kalsi-Ryan¹, Lindsay Tetreault¹, Adrian Crawley³, Howard Ginsberg¹, David J. Mikulis³, and Michael G. Fehlings¹

¹Neurosurgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, ²Electrical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, ³Medical Imaging, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

This study investigates if DTI, MT, and T2*-weighted imaging of the rostral cervical cord can 1) detect injury of WM tracts, 2) correlate with global and focal disability, and 3) predict outcomes in degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM). Data includes detailed clinical assessments, electrophysiology, and MRI, repeated at 1-year. Quantitative MRI in 37 DCM patients and 29 healthy controls provided reliable results and showed decreased CSA, FA, and MTR, and increased T2* WM/GM ratio. FA of individual tracts correlates well with clinical measures. Quantitative multimodal assessment of WM injury with a clinically feasible protocol is possible, with many potential clinical applications.

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