Publication details

Comparison of multicenter MRI protocols for visualizing the spinal cord gray matter

Authors	COHEN-ADAD Julien ALONSO-ORTIZ Eva ALLEY Stephanie LAGANA Maria Marcella BAGLIO Francesca VANNESJO Signe Johanna KARBASFOROUSHAN Haleh SEIF Maryam SEIFERT Alan C XU Junqian KIM Joo-Won LABOUNEK Rene VOJTÍŠEK Lubomír DOSTAL Marek VALOSEK Jan SAMSON Rebecca S GRUSSU Francesco BATTISTON Marco WHEELER-KINGSHOTT Claudia A M Gandini YIANNAKAS Marios C GILBERT Guillaume SCHNEIDER Torben JOHNSON Brian PRADOS Ferran
Year of publication	2022
Type	Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source	MAGNETIC RESONANCE IN MEDICINE
MU Faculty or unit	Central European Institute of Technology
Citation
web	https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrm.29249
Doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mrm.29249
Keywords	acquisition; gray matter; image quality; MRI; protocol; spinal cord
Description	Purpose Spinal cord gray-matter imaging is valuable for a number of applications, but remains challenging. The purpose of this work was to compare various MRI protocols at 1.5 T, 3 T, and 7 T for visualizing the gray matter. Methods In vivo data of the cervical spinal cord were collected from nine different imaging centers. Data processing consisted of automatically segmenting the spinal cord and its gray matter and co-registering back-to-back scans. We computed the SNR using two methods (SNR_single using a single scan and SNR_diff using the difference between back-to-back scans) and the white/gray matter contrast-to-noise ratio per unit time. Synthetic phantom data were generated to evaluate the metrics performance. Experienced radiologists qualitatively scored the images. We ran the same processing on an open-access multicenter data set of the spinal cord MRI (N = 267 participants). Results Qualitative assessments indicated comparable image quality for 3T and 7T scans. Spatial resolution was higher at higher field strength, and image quality at 1.5 T was found to be moderate to low. The proposed quantitative metrics were found to be robust to underlying changes to the SNR and contrast; however, the SNR_single method lacked accuracy when there were excessive partial-volume effects. Conclusion We propose quality assessment criteria and metrics for gray-matter visualization and apply them to different protocols. The proposed criteria and metrics, the analyzed protocols, and our open-source code can serve as a benchmark for future optimization of spinal cord gray-matter imaging protocols.