To assess brain plasticity after a unilateral incomplete cervical spinal cord injury (SCI), a complete neural axis assessment was performed using the adult rat model of cervical SCI at the C2/C3 level. Structural T1 and T2-spinal cord anatomical imaging and resting state BOLD-fMRI (9.4T) of the brain was performed 1 month after SCI in sham and SCI animals. The unilateral SCI induced lesion was discernable from anatomical images. Intrinsic brain activity assessed using functional connectivity density (FCD) mapping of global, short-range and long-range connectivity revealed a significant increase in FCD across SCI animals compared to sham.
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