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Imaging of Spinal Cord Infections
Jason F Talbott1, Amrutha Ramachandran2, Christopher Murphy3
1Emergency and Acute Care and Neuroradiology Section, Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Brain and Spinal Injury Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Abstract:
Primary infectious myelitis is a rare but critical diagnosis with potential for severe morbidity and permanent neurologic deficit if not detected and treated early. This article introduces an image-guided framework that organizes spinal cord infections into 5 distinct transverse magnetic resonance imaging patterns: extramedullary, centromedullary, eccentric tract-specific, frontal horn, and irregular or mass-like. This article recognizes the substantial variability in imaging manifestations of various infections in the spinal cord, and the proposed pattern-based approach is not intended to serve as a rigid diagnostic schema. Rather, it provides radiologists with a practical starting framework for evaluating acute infectious myelopathy.