Abstract #4082

Neuropathological injury severity score correlates with MRI tissue microstructure in human post-mortem traumatic cervical spinal cord injury

Nikolai Lesack^1,2,3, Sarah Rosemary Morris^1,2,3, Andrew Yung^1,2,4, Kirsten Bale^3,4, Andrew Bauman⁴, Piotr Kozlowski^1,2,3,4, Zahra Samadi-Bahrami^2,5, Caron Fournier^2,5, Pushwant Singh Mattu⁶, Lisa Parker⁶, Kevin Dong², Femke Streijger², G.R. Wayne Moore^2,5,6, Adam Velenosi², Veronica Hirsch-Reinshagen^2,5,6, Brian K Kwon^2,7, and Cornelia Laule^1,2,3,4,5

¹Physics and Astronomy, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ²International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ³Radiology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ⁴UBC MRI Research Centre, The University of British columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ⁵Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ⁶Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ⁷Orthopaedics, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Synopsis

Keywords: Spinal Cord, Spinal Cord, Diffusion, ActiveAx, DTI, Axons, Post Mortem, Ex-vivo, Spinal Cord Injury, Validation, Neuropathology, injury severity score, 7T, high field

Motivation: Knowing how well diffusion MRI metrics reflect tissue injury in spinal cord injury (SCI) will help evaluate the feasibility of using MRI as a proxy for histological-confirmed microstructural damage.

Goal(s): To determine the relationship between histologically determined neuropathological injury severity scores and diffusion tensor imaging and ActiveAx metrics in post-mortem SCI tissue.

Approach: We compared 7T diffusion MRI metrics to neuropathological scores using human post-mortem spinal cord samples.

Results: Correlations between diffusion MRI metrics and neuropathological severity scores indicated that different diffusion metrics may have different sensitivities to degree of tissue damage in SCI.

Impact: A multi-metric diffusion MRI approach can probe different aspects of microstructural damage in spinal cord injury. In-vivo assessment of spinal cord injury pathology using diffusion MRI could allow for improved clinical decision making.

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