Abstract #4678

Voxel-based analysis of grey and white matter degeneration above the level of injury in cervical spinal cord injury

Eveline Huber¹, Gergely David¹, Niklaus Weiskopf^2,3, Siawoosh Mohammadi^3,4, and Patrick Freund^1,2,3,5

¹University Hospital Balgrist, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, ²Department of Neurophysics, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, ³Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom, ⁴of Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany, ⁵Department of Brain Repair and Rehabilitation, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom

We studied the extent of cervical grey and white matter neurodegeneration above the level of injury after traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) using high-resolution structural and diffusion MRI data. We found marked atrophy of both white and grey matter alongside diffusivity changes associated with axonal degeneration within the major spinal tracts. The extent of structural decline related to clinical impairment. These tract specific changes and clinicopathological relationships shed light into underlying neurodegenerative disease mechanisms, and therefore these measureable changes hold potential to serve as neuroimaging biomarkers of cord pathology.

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