Abstract #0304

Column-specific microstructural changes in patients with non-myelopathic degenerative compression of the cervical spinal cord revealed by diffusion MRI

Jan Valošek^1,2, René Labounek^1,3, Tomáš Horák^4,5, Alena Svátková^4,6, Petr Kudlička⁴, Pavel Hok¹, Jan Kočica^4,5, Christophe Lenglet⁷, Petr Hluštík¹, Josef Bednařík^4,5, and Petr Bednařík^4,8

¹Department of Neurology, University Hospital Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic, ²Department of Biomedical Engineering, University Hospital Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic, ³Department of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States, ⁴Central European Institute of Technology, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, ⁵Department of Neurology, University Hospital Brno, Brno, Czech Republic, ⁶Department of Medicine III, Clinical Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, ⁷Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, Minneapolis, MN, United States, ⁸High Field MR Centre, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

While delineation of microstructural changes in white matter (WM) columns of cervical spinal cord (CSC) in patients with non-myelopathic degenerative CSC compression (NMDCSCC) remains a challenge for most current MRI techniques, High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) protocols promise to overcome this issue. Thus, our group utilized novel HARDI-ZOOMit protocol to extract metrics from diffusion tensor and ball-and-stick models in three major CSC columns. HARDI-ZOOMit protocol was able to detect column-specific significant differences between healthy controls and patients with NMDCSCC with more complex abnormalities in ventral CSC columns in C3-C6 levels.

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