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Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging Assessment of Cervical Spinal Cord Injury in Rats
Seung Yi Lee1, Shekar Kurpad2, and Matthew Budde2
1Biophysics, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United States, 2Neurosurgery, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, United States
The association of chronic motor function with the extent of edema, hemorrhage and axonal injury was investigated.  Filtered-DWI improved axonal damage presentation and a rat-specific MRI template was constructed for inter-subject/modality registration. 

Figure 1 Multi-contrast MRI in acute cervical cord contusion

The extent of the cord damage is captured in different modalities in both unilateral- and bilateral contusion injury. Edema (hyperintensity, T2w), hemorrhage (hypointensity, T2*w), vasogenic edema (blue, black triangle), and cytotoxic edema (red, white triangle) are evident in their respective contrasts. fDWI images clearly delineates focal axonal damage compared to T2w, T2*w and DTI.

Figure 2 Inter-subject registration pipeline

A histologic spinal cord atlas was digitized across all spinal cord levels to generate a template with pseudo T2-weighted contrast used for MRI registration. Manually marked spinal cord level aided initial z-level alignment and straightening followed by x-y plane registration to the template. Registered single subject images were averaged and registered iteratively across all subjects with the group mean image showing clear spinal cord anatomy.