Diffusion Tensor Imaging of the Normal and Injured Pediatric Spinal Cord at

Feroze B. Mohamed¹, Louis N. Hunter², Nadia Barakat¹, Chia-Shang Liu¹, Haris Sair³, Amer Samdani², Randal Betz², Scott H. Faro¹, John Gaughan¹, Mary J. Mulcahey²

To measure and establish normative DTI parameters of healthy spinal cord tissue in children with idiopathic scoliosis as a means for comparison with children with spinal cord injury (SCI). 5 subjects with idiopathic scoliosis and 5 subjects with SCI were imaged twice using DTI. The SCI subjects showed reduced FA values and increased D values compared with control subjects. Test-retest reproducibility showed excellent inter class correlation (ICC) in all the control group DTI index values (>0.9) while the SCI group showed moderate ICC (>0.7). There were statistically significant correlations between the DTI indices and several ISNCSCI clinical impairment scores.