Full spine 3D T2-weighted MRI with improved stitching for segmentation of the intrathecal space

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used to model the behavior of cerebral-spinal-fluid (CSF) flow along the spine in research of intrathecal drug delivery. However, the model geometry highly impacts the CFD-based prediction of CSF flow. Enhanced images of the spinal CSF can be obtained with T2-weighted MRI, typically collected in 3-4 stations. Here we present a method to stitch spine images for CSF segmentation and compare it to the scanner’s stitching technique. Our offline approach appears more robust to movement and field-of-view adjustments while scanning and presents acceptable CSF signal intensity homogeneity across the spine for tissue segmentation.