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Updated: Jun 25, 2025
Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Chronic Spinal Cord Compression
Published on: May 7, 2019
Within-participants reliability and measurement error of magnetization transfer imaging determinations within the
H Al-Shaari1, C J Heales2, J Fulford2
1Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Medical Imaging Department, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK; College of Applied Medical Sciences, Radiological Sciences Department, Najran University, Najran, 61441, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Purpose:
To assess the within-participant reliability and measurement error in the determination of MTR in the healthy human cervical spinal cord.
Methods And Materials:
A total of twenty healthy controls (10 male, mean ± sd age: 33.9 ± 3.5 years, 10 females, mean ± sd age: 47.5 ± 14.4 years), with no family history of any neurological disorders or a contraindication to MRI scanning were recruited over a period of two months. Each participant was scanned twice with a 3T MRI scanner using standard MTI sequences. Spinal Cord Toolbox (v5.4) was used for image post-processing. Data were first segmented and then registered to a template and then MTR was computed. The within-participant coefficients of variation (CV%), single and average within-participants intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and Bland-Altman plots were determined for MT values over the volume between the 2nd and 5th cervical vertebrae for the total WM and for specific WM regions: dorsal column (DC), ventral column (VC) and lateral column (LC).
Results:
MTR showed poor to excellent within-participant reliability for the total WM, DC, VC and LC with single/average ICC values of 0.03/0.06, 0.10/0.18, 0.39/0.75, and 0.001/0.002, respectively, and the CV% reported an acceptable variation with values less than 10%. The Bland-Altman plots showed good within-participant agreement between the scan-rescan values.
Conclusion:
This study demonstrates that clinical trials using MTI technique are feasible and shows that quantitative MTI can monitor tissue changes in degenerative WM patients.
Implications For Practice:
MTI with its MTR index provide broad assessment of the integrity of white matter tissue and are being studied widely in brain as a diagnostic tool for the assessment of different neurological diseases.
