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Abstract #0914

Multi-Parametric Spinal Cord MRI Detects Subclinical Tissue Injury in Asymptomatic Cervical Spinal Cord Compression

Allan R. Martin1, Benjamin De Leener2, Julien Cohen-Adad2, David W. Cadotte3, Jefferson R. Wilson1, Lindsay Tetreault1,4, Aria Nouri1, Adrian Crawley5, David J. Mikulis5, Howard Ginsberg1, and Michael G. Fehlings1

1Neurosurgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2Electrical Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada, 3Neurosurgery, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, 4Medicine, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, 5Medical Imaging, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) involves extrinsic spinal cord (SC) compression causing tissue injury and neurological dysfunction. Asymptomatic SC compression is much more common (8-26%), but it is unknown if tissue injury occurs in this group. Our multi-parametric MRI protocol previously identified 10 measures of tissue injury in DCM. Using these techniques, we demonstrate that asymptomatic SC compression subjects show a similar pattern of tissue injury, with 8/10 measures (p=0.05) showing the same direction of changes and MTRRostral (p=0.002), MTRMCL (p=0.03), and T2*w WM/GMRostral (p=0.04) showing significant univariate differences. A logistic regression model retaining 3 MRI measures shows 86% discrimination between compressed and uncompressed subjects.

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