Sarah Rosemary Morris1,2,3, Andrew Yung1,2,4, Valentin Prevost1,2,4, Shana George1, Andrew Bauman1,2,4, Piotr Kozlowski1,2,3,4, Farah Samadi1,5, Caron Fournier1,5, Lisa Parker6, Kevin Dong1, Femke Streijger1, Veronica Hirsch-Reinshagen1,5,6, G.R. Wayne Moore1,5,6, Brian K Kwon1,7, and Cornelia Laule1,2,3,5
1International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2Radiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 3Physics & Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 4UBC MRI Research Centre, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 5Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 6Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 7Vancouver Spine Surgery Institute, Vancouver, BC, Canada
1International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2Radiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 3Physics & Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 4UBC MRI Research Centre, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 5Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 6Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 7Vancouver Spine Surgery Institute, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Myelin and axon-sensitive MRI metrics were quantitatively correlated with histology for myelin and axons in human spinal cord injury tissue. Myelin MRI metrics correlated with myelin staining, but axon MRI and staining metrics did not correlate.
Figure 1: MRI and histology data for patients from the International Spinal Cord Injury Biobank included in this study. Advanced MRI was collected 9mm above and 9mm below injury epicentre. IDI: injury-death interval; ihMT: inhomogeneous magnetization transfer; MWF: myelin water fraction; DTI: diffusion tensor imaging; RD: radial diffusivity; LFB: Luxol fast blue; FA: fractional anisotropy; AD: axial diffusivity; DBSI: diffusion basis spectrum imaging; FF: fibre fraction; pNF: phosphorylated neurofilament.
Figure 4: Spearman correlations between Luxol fast blue (LFB) staining for myelin phospholipids and three myelin-sensitive MRI metrics (radial diffusivity (RD), myelin water fraction (MWF), inhomogeneous magnetization transfer (ihMT)). All three metrics had significant, moderately strong correlations with LFB. MWF had the strongest correlation, RD the weakest. T1D filtering slightly increased the strength of the correlation with ihMT.
