Keywords: Spinal Cord, Spinal Cord
Motivation: Spinal cord atrophy, a key biomarker in neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis, is challenging to measure reliably across varying MRI contrasts and protocols in multi-center studies.
Goal(s): To evaluate a novel, contrast-agnostic “soft” segmentation method’s sensitivity for atrophy detection by calculating spinal cord cross-sectional area (CSA) at specific vertebral levels.
Approach: We applied rescaling and transformations on MRI scans to simulate atrophy and used our segmentation model to calculate CSA, comparing results with previous methods through a scan-rescan experiment.
Results: The contrast-agnostic model, significantly reduced sample sizes needed for detecting spinal cord atrophy, especially with soft segmentations.
Impact: Reducing the required sample size will allow for early spinal cord atrophy detection, especially in multi-center and multi-contrast studies.
How to access this content:
For one year after publication, abstracts and videos are only open to registrants of this annual meeting. Registrants should use their existing login information. Non-registrant access can be purchased via the ISMRM E-Library.
After one year, current ISMRM & ISMRT members get free access to both the abstracts and videos. Non-members and non-registrants must purchase access via the ISMRM E-Library.
After two years, the meeting proceedings (abstracts) are opened to the public and require no login information. Videos remain behind password for access by members, registrants and E-Library customers.
Keywords