Impact speed does not determine severity of spinal cord injury in mice with fixed impact displacement

The speed of three leading rodent SCI impacting devices-0.1 m/s (Infinite Horizon), 0.2 m/s (Ohio State University), and 0.4 m/s (New York University)-were investigated using a custom-fabricated impactor to determine its effect on mouse spinal cord injury severity. The spared white matter was examined at 7 and 21 days post-injury with in vivo diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and post-mortem histology, respectively. The neurological outcome of the injured mice was longitudinally evaluated using the Basso mouse scale. In vivo DTI derived diffusion anisotropy maps provided excellent gray-white matter contrast enabling objective and noninvasive quantification of normal appearing white matter. In vivo DTI estimated spared white matter content correlated well with those determined using post-mortem histology. No significant difference in BMS was observed among injury groups of various impact speeds. The present results suggest that injury severity can be reproduced using speeds from 0.1 to 0.4 m/s at the fixed impact displacement.