Abstract #2509

Toward Clinical Translation of Quantitative Spinal Cord MRI: Serial Monitoring to Identify Disease Progression in Patients with Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy

Allan R. Martin¹, Benjamin De Leener², Julien Cohen-Adad², David W. Cadotte³, Jefferson R. Wilson¹, Lindsay Tetreault^1,4, Stefan F. Lange¹, Aria Nouri¹, Adrian Crawley⁵, David J. Mikulis⁵, Howard Ginsberg¹, and Michael G. Fehlings¹

¹Neurosurgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, ²Electrical Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, ³Neurosurgery, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, ⁴Medicine, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, ⁵Medical Imaging, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) is a common cause of disability, but mild patients are often managed non-operatively and monitored for deterioration. Popular clinical assessment tools are insensitive to detect subtle disease progression. In this study, we employ multi-parametric spinal cord MRI to monitor 15 DCM patients for progression over a 1-year period, in addition to a comprehensive battery of clinical assessments. The MRI results detected progressive tissue injury in 6/7 patients with definite clinical progression and 5 additional patients (4 of which had borderline clinical progression). These MRI assessments are now being incorporated into clinical practice to inform surgical decision-making.

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