Abstract #2523

Spinal cord injury-induced changes in thoracolumbar microarchitecture: a semi-automated DTI pipeline for improved clinical translation

Georgia E. Bright^1,2, Angela Walls^3,4,5, Thorsten Feiweier⁶, Wickramaarchchigeige Lakshantha^3,5,7, Patrick Stroman^8,9,10, Jillian M. Clark^1,2, and Ryan L. O'Hare Doig^1,2,3,5

¹School of Medicine, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia, ²Neil Sachse Centre for Spinal Cord Research, Lifelong Health Theme, South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, Adelaide, Australia, ³Preclinical, Imaging and Research Laboratories, South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, Adelaide, Australia, ⁴Clinical & Research Imaging Centre, South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, Adelaide, Australia, ⁵National Imaging Facility, South Australian Node, Adelaide, Australia, ⁶Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Erlangen, Germany, ⁷Australian Cancer Research Foundation Molecular Theranostics Laboratory, Centenary Institute, Sydney, Australia, ⁸Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada, ⁹Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada, ¹⁰Department of Physics, Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada

Synopsis

Keywords: Spinal Cord, Microstructure, Diffusion Tensor Imaging

Motivation: While diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is sensitive to spinal cord injury (SCI)-induced microstructural changes, manual pre-processing of thoracolumbar spinal cord (TL-SC) data precludes its clinical translation.

Goal(s): We aimed to optimise a semi-automatic TL-SC DTI protocol to detect SCI-induced microarchitectural changes.

Approach: TL-SC DTI data from two participants with diagnosed SCI and six healthy volunteers were pre-processed to equate the TL-SC microarchitecture and then compared to semi-automated analysis.

Results: Our optimised TL-SC DTI acquisition and semi-automatic analysis pipeline is sensitive to SCI-induced microstructural changes and may provide a more clinically viable method for TL-SC DTI analysis.

Impact: This study assessed and validated our newly developed thoracolumbar spinal cord (TL-SC) diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) pipeline in detecting spinal cord injury (SCI)-induced microstructural changes and offers an alternative semi-automatic pre-processing method for improved clinical translation.

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