Junqian Xu1, Eric C. Klawiter1,
Joshua S. Shimony2, Abraham Z. Snyder, 12, Robert T.
Naismith1, Agus Priatna3, Tammie Benzinger2,
Anne Cross1, Sheng-Kwei Song2
1Neurology, Washington University in
St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, United States; 2Radiology, Washington
University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, United States; 3Siemens
Medical Solution, United States
We
describe a reproducible in vivo human cervical spinal cord diffusion tensor
imaging (DTI) protocol at 3T. The data
acquisition and analysis procedures are described with examples from healthy
(n = 17) and pathological human spinal (n = 2) cords. The described comprehensive approach (1)
accounts for the natural curvature of the human spinal cord by covering C1-6
with separate tiltable slices/groups, (2) minimizes distortion and signal
drop-out by localized shimming, (3) improves the robustness by
motion-correction and motion-based outlier rejection, (4) corrects negative
eigenvalues by non-negative non-linear DTI calculation, and (5) employs
objective geometry based region-of-interest selection for tract
identification.