Abstract #3457

Impact of manual segmentation on the non-linear registration of a spinal cord atlas to functional space

Mark A Hoggarth¹, Max C Wang², Kimberly J Hemmerling^1,2, Zachary A Smith³, Kenneth A Weber II⁴, and Molly G Bright^1,2

¹Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States, ²Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States, ³Neurosurgery, Oklahoma University, Oklahoma City, OK, United States, ⁴Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States

Contouring the cervical spinal cord in functional MRI is a difficult but necessary task, that is typically performed manually. Differences between raters in drawing these masks could directly affect overall study results. This work compared the differences between spinal cord masks drawn by raters of varied experience with an expert rater on temporal mean fMRI images from 14 healthy participants; then the resultant warped atlas masks in functional space after non-linear registration using the Spinal Cord Toolbox. Performing non-linear registration increased overall agreement of the masks as a whole and along the edges where most disagreement occurs.

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