Julien Cohen-Adad1,2, Hugues Leblond2, Aurobrata Ghosh3, Maxime Descoteaux4, Rachid Deriche3, Habib Benali1, Serge Rossignol2
1INSERM, Univ Paris 6, Pitie Salpetriere Hospital, Paris, France; 2GRSNC, Physiology department, Univ Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada; 3Odysse Project Team, INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France; 4Neurospin, NMR Lab, CEA, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Previous studies showed how metrics derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) are useful to quantify spinal cord integrity following injury. However, DTI model may not be optimal for complex diffusion profiles, where less constraining techniques such as q-ball imaging (QBI) would be more adapted. In this study, we applied QBI in cats with partial spinal cord injury and we compared various QBI quantitative metrics to that ones already used in DTI. We also propose an original QBI-based metric to quantify the homogeneity of diffusion directions. Results show the benefits of QBI metrics to quantitatively study spinal cord microstructure.