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Detecting atrophy in the spinal cord (SC) is highly relevant in multiple sclerosis (MS) and other neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases. The most used method is measuring mean upper cervical cord area (MUCCA) from SC images. MRI of SC is time consuming and not always available. We recently developed a method to measure MUCCA directly from conventional T1w brain images. This work compares MUCCA estimates derived from MPRAGE and MP2RAGE sequences, determine reference ranges from 98 healthy subjects and show their value to detect atrophy in patients with progressive MS and neuromyelitis optica. We observe very high agreement between methods.
Disselhorst et al. (Wed,) studied this question.