Imaging Techniques in Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal imaging is crucial for diagnosing, treating, and rehabilitating spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. Advanced imaging techniques are being developed to provide detailed information about the spinal cord's structure and metabolism. Conventional methods like radiography, CT, and MRI offer macrostructural information about bone and ligament damage. Novel techniques such as DTI, MRS, PET, SPECT, and fMRI focus on microstructural and biochemical aspects. This review details structural changes with SCI and their imaging correlations. It also discusses clinical uses of new spinal cord imaging methods for SCI.

• 1
  Conventional MRI may not consistently correlate with clinical findings post-SCI, prompting interest in microstructural and metabolic imaging.
• 2
  DTI is a more sensitive biomarker of spinal cord damage compared to standard T2-weighted imaging.
• 3
  Spinal fMRI can map spinal function related to motor and sensory functions, showing neural activity even below the injury level.