Rapid in vivo detection of rat spinal cord injury with double-diffusion-encoded magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Magn Reson Med 2017 Apr;77(4):1639-1649
Date
04/16/2016Pubmed ID
27080726Pubmed Central ID
PMC5285487DOI
10.1002/mrm.26243Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84963629087 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 37 CitationsAbstract
PURPOSE: Diffusion-weighted imaging is a common experimental tool for evaluating spinal cord injury (SCI), yet it suffers from complications that decrease its clinical effectiveness. The most commonly used technique, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), is often confounded by effects of edema accompanying acute SCI, limiting its sensitivity to the important functional status marker of axonal integrity. The purpose of this study is to introduce a novel diffusion-acquisition method with the goal of overcoming these limitations.
METHODS: A double diffusion encoding (DDE) pulse sequence was implemented with a diffusion-weighted filter orthogonal to the spinal cord for suppressing nonneural signals prior to diffusion weighting parallel to the cord. A point-resolved spectroscopy readout (DDE-PRESS) was used for improved sensitivity and compared with DTI in a rat model of SCI with varying injury severities.
RESULTS: The DDE-PRESS parameter, restricted fraction, showed a strong relationship with injury severity (P < 0.001, R2 = 0.67). Although the whole-cord averaged DTI parameter values exhibited only minor injury relationships, a weighted region of interest (ROI) based DTI analysis improved sensitivity to injury (P < 0.001, R2 = 0.66).
CONCLUSIONS: In a rat model of SCI, DDE-PRESS demonstrated high sensitivity to injury with substantial decreases in acquisition time and data processing. This method shows promise for application in rapid evaluation of SCI severity. Magn Reson Med 77:1639-1649, 2017. © 2016 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Author List
Skinner NP, Kurpad SN, Schmit BD, Tugan Muftuler L, Budde MDAuthors
Matthew Budde PhD Associate Professor in the Neurosurgery department at Medical College of WisconsinShekar N. Kurpad MD, PhD Chair, Director, Professor in the Neurosurgery department at Medical College of Wisconsin
Lutfi Tugan Muftuler PhD Professor in the Neurosurgery department at Medical College of Wisconsin
Brian Schmit PhD Professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at Marquette University
Nathan Skinner in the CTSI department at Medical College of Wisconsin - CTSI
MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AlgorithmsAnimals
Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Female
Image Enhancement
Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
Reproducibility of Results
Sensitivity and Specificity
Severity of Illness Index
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Spinal Cord Injuries