Electrically Active In-Vitro Spinal Cords for the Study of Functional Diffusion Weighted Imaging

Nitzan Tirosh¹, Uri Nevo¹

DWI is explored in the last years as a tool for imaging brain activity. However the actual interaction between brain function and water is not yet understood and intensive investigation is therefore needed. We suggest the use of isolated and perfused spinal cords of newborn rats as a novel model for the study of the response of vital, mammalian neuronal tissues in the MRI simultaneously to electrical activity recording. This model enables to acquire high resolution and high SNR images and good ADC maps while extracting out multiple physiological factors that are not related to the neuronal mechanisms under question.