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BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: In traumatic spinal cord injury, DTI is sensitive to injury but is unable to differentiate multiple pathologies. Axonal damage is a central feature of the underlying cord injury, but prominent edema confounds its detection. The purpose of this study was to examine a filtered DWI technique in patients with acute spinal cord injury. MATERIALS AND METHODS: . Parallel diffusivity metrics obtained from DTI and filtered DWI were compared. RESULTS: The high-strength diffusion-weighting perpendicular to the cord suppressed signals from tissues outside of the spinal cord, including muscle and CSF. The parallel ADC acquired from filtered DWI at the level of injury relative to the most cranial region showed a greater decrease (38.71%) compared with the decrease in axial diffusivity acquired by DTI (17.68%). CONCLUSIONS: The results demonstrated that filtered DWI is feasible in the acute setting of spinal cord injury and reveals spinal cord diffusion characteristics not evident with conventional DTI.
Murphy et al. (Thu,) studied this question.