Detection of Nerve Injury with Diffusion Weighted Wide Band Steady State Free Precession (DW-WBSSFP) in the Lumbar Spine

Giovanna Danagoulian¹, Rivka R. Colen, Krishna Nayak², Srinivasan Mukundan, Ferenc Jolesz, Ehud J. Schmidt

3D High-resolution Wide-band Steady State Free Precession (WBSSFP), a variant of SSFP with alternating short and long repetition times (TRs) that allows for high-resolution spine imaging, a result of reduced susceptibility artifacts, was further modified to include diffusion gradients in its short-TR period. The new sequence, Diffusion-weighted WBSSFP (DW-WBSSFP) was applied to detecting nerve injury, based on changes in diffusion, in the extra-dural spine. In a cohort of patients with degenerative spine diseases, DW-WBSSP detected large change in diffusion not seen in normals.