The current state-of-the-art of spinal cord imaging: Methods

Stroman, Patrick W.; Wheeler-Kingshott, Claudia A. M.; Bacon, M.; Schwab, Jan M.; Bosma, Rachael L.; Brooks, Jonathan; Cadotte, David W.; Carlstedt, Thomas; Ciccarelli, Olga; Cohen‐Adad, Julien; Curt, Armin; Evangelou, Nikos; Fehlings, Michael G.; Filippi, Massimo; Kelley, Brian J.; Kollias, Spyros; MacKay, Alex L.; Porro, Carlo Adolfo; Smith, Seth A.; Strittmatter, Stephen M.; Summers, Paul; Tracey, Irene

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.04.124

Cited by 284 publications

(258 citation statements)

References 132 publications

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“…The fMRI activation in contralateral dorsal horns has been reported in human spinal fMRI studies, but the results so far have been inconsistent with respect to which horn is engaged in pain versus touch processing, partly due to the relatively low spatial resolution in conventional human 3T MRI studies (22, 23) (for recent reviews, see refs. 24,25). The contralateral dorsal horn activation we detected may be a result of feedback-descending modulation (20,21) or from commissural connections between dorsal horns (26).…”

Section: Discussion Widespread Fmri Responses To Noxious Stimuli Withmentioning

confidence: 67%

Injury alters intrinsic functional connectivity within the primate spinal cord

Chen

Mishra²,

Yang³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Recent demonstrations of correlated low-frequency MRI signal variations between subregions of the spinal cord at rest in humans, similar to those found in the brain, suggest that such resting-state functional connectivity constitutes a common feature of the intrinsic organization of the entire central nervous system. We report our detection of functional connectivity within the spinal cords of anesthetized squirrel monkeys at rest and show that the strength of connectivity within these networks is altered by the effects of injuries. By quantifying the low-frequency MRI signal correlations between different horns within spinal cord gray matter, we found distinct functional connectivity relationships between the different sensory and motor horns, a pattern that was similar to activation patterns evoked by nociceptive heat or tactile stimulation of digits. All horns within a single spinal segment were functionally connected, with the strongest connectivity occurring between ipsilateral dorsal and ventral horns. Each horn was strongly connected to the same horn on neighboring segments, but this connectivity reduced drastically along the spinal cord. Unilateral injury to the spinal cord significantly weakened the strength of the intrasegment horn-to-horn connectivity only on the injury side and in slices below the lesion. These findings suggest resting-state functional connectivity may be a useful biomarker of functional integrity in injured and recovering spinal cords.hand | spinal cord injury | resting state fMRI | monkey | cervical spinal cord R esting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) has been widely used to identify and characterize neural circuits in the brain (1-3), and its presentation at various spatial scales and its changes with specific physiological conditions confirm its fundamental role in maintaining normal brain function (4, 5). More importantly, alterations of rsFC networks in various disease conditions have altered our view about the functional significance of spontaneous baseline neural activity (3). Two very recent reports of success in detecting intrinsic functional circuits in human spines using resting-state fMRI once more suggest that rsFC is a fundamental, common feature of the entire nervous system (6, 7).Despite these exciting findings in human subjects, the functional and behavioral relevance of the intrinsic functional networks within the spine gray matter remains largely obscure, and there have been no previous reports attempting to understand their significance. One way to address this question is to manipulate the network and then examine how the network reacts to the manipulation. This type of approach is impossible to execute in humans but can be performed in nonhuman primates in a very well-controlled manner. Thus, this study aimed to better understand the functional and behavioral relevance of newly identified rsFC in the spinal cord by first determining whether similar intrinsic rsFC networks can be detected in the spinal cords of anesthetized monkeys. We also sought to determ...

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Section: Discussion Widespread Fmri Responses To Noxious Stimuli Withmentioning

confidence: 67%

Injury alters intrinsic functional connectivity within the primate spinal cord

Chen

Mishra²,

Yang³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…12,18 The development of methods to manage the hostile imaging environment and to account for cardiorespiratory-related motion has allowed improved applications to detect structural (such as diffusion and magnetization transfer imaging) and functional anomalies that occur in relation to traumatic injury of the spinal cord. 1,2,19,20 Other disorders, such as multiple sclerosis, have also benefited from spinal cord imaging.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing the Location of Spinal and Vertebral Levels in the Human Cervical Spinal Cord

Cadotte

Cohen‐Adad

et al. 2014

AJNR Am J Neuroradiol

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BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:Advanced MR imaging techniques are critical to understanding the pathophysiology of conditions involving the spinal cord. We provide a novel, quantitative solution to map vertebral and spinal cord levels accounting for anatomic variability within the human spinal cord. For the first time, we report a population distribution of the segmental anatomy of the cervical spinal cord that has direct implications for the interpretation of advanced imaging studies most often conducted across groups of subjects.

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“…A likely reason for the relative dearth of spinal fMRI studies lies in the difficulty of obtaining reliable results from this structure, which is due to a number of factors (Giove et al, 2004;Stroman, 2005;Stroman et al, 2014;Summers et al, 2010). First of all, the spinal cord has a very small cross-sectional diameter (approximately 12mm in the left-right and 8mm in the anterior-posterior direction at the cervical level; Fradet et al, 2014;Ko et al, 2004), which makes it necessary to use a high in-plane resolution to minimize partial-volume effects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Denoising spinal cord fMRI data: Approaches to acquisition and analysis

et al. 2017

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General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. AbstractFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human spinal cord is a difficult endeavour due to the cord's small cross-sectional diameter, signal drop-out as well as image distortion due to magnetic field inhomogeneity, and the confounding influence of physiological noise from cardiac and respiratory sources. Nevertheless, there is great interest in spinal fMRI due to the spinal cord's role as the principal sensorimotor interface between the brain and the body and its involvement in a variety of sensory and motor pathologies. In this review, we give an overview of the various methods that have been used to address the technical challenges in spinal fMRI, with a focus on reducing the impact of physiological noise. We start out by describing acquisition methods that have been tailored to the special needs of spinal cord fMRI and aim to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and reduce distortion in obtained images. Following this, we concentrate on image processing and analysis approaches that address the detrimental effects of noise. While these include variations of standard pre-processing methods such as motion correction and spatial filtering, the main focus lies on denoising techniques that can be applied to taskbased as well as resting-state data sets. We review both model-based approaches that rely on externally acquired respiratory and cardiac signals as well as data-driven approaches that estimate and correct for noise using the data themselves. We conclude with an outlook on techniques that have been successfully applied for noise reduction in brain imaging and whose use might be beneficial for fMRI of the human spinal cord.3

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The current state-of-the-art of spinal cord imaging: Methods

Cited by 284 publications

References 132 publications

Injury alters intrinsic functional connectivity within the primate spinal cord

Injury alters intrinsic functional connectivity within the primate spinal cord

Characterizing the Location of Spinal and Vertebral Levels in the Human Cervical Spinal Cord

Denoising spinal cord fMRI data: Approaches to acquisition and analysis

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