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Chapter 55 - Physiological MR of the spine

from Section 9 - The spine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2013

By
Claudia Wheeler-Kingshott  and
Olga Ciccarelli
Edited by
Jonathan H. Gillard ,
Adam D. Waldman  and
Peter B. Barker
Jonathan H. Gillard
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Adam D. Waldman
Affiliation:
Imperial College London
Peter B. Barker
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
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Summary

Introduction

The spinal cord is a common site of involvement in neurological disorders, including tumors, trauma, degeneration, and demyelinating diseases. Disease in the spinal cord greatly contributes to a patient’s disability, causing motor, sensory, and sphincter dysfunction. However, imaging of the spinal cord is more challenging than that of the brain, and several technical limitations need to be overcome, including the small size of the cord, artifacts induced by susceptibility changes between tissue and bone, artifacts related to the chemical shift between water and fat, and artifacts induced by the motion arising from respiratory and cardiac motion and cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) pulsation. Conventional qualitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences may be useful to localize the damage and clarify the type of injury in the spinal cord, but they do not reflect the underlying pathological mechanisms, such as axonal integrity, myelin disruption, and gliosis. Therefore, there is a need to develop new quantitative MRI techniques to provide measures that are more pathologically specific and that may be used in the future to monitor therapies to enhance the mechanisms of spinal cord repair and improve clinical outcome.

This chapter reviews the main physiological MR techniques that have been used in the most common neurological diseases affecting the spinal cord before discussing possible future developments of imaging of the spine and promising clinical applications.

Type
Chapter
Information
Clinical MR Neuroimaging
Physiological and Functional Techniques
 , pp. 853 - 863
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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