ECTRIMS 2022 | Spinal cord reserve: validation of SCaA-SCT in a prospective cohort of MS patients

Jaume Sastre-Garriga, MD, PhD, Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, Barcelona, Spain, shares updates on the concept of spinal cord reserve and its association with disability in multiple sclerosis (MS). An algorithm based on the Spinal Cord Toolbox has recently been developed to obtain semi-automatic estimations of the spinal canal area (SCaA -SCT) and, that way, allow testing the existence of a spinal cord reserve. To validate this method, a study compared SCaA-SCT and manual ground truth segmentations of SCaA, in healthy controls and patients with MS and compared SCaA-SCT measurements obtained with whole-brain and spine MRIs. The investigators also estimated changes in SCaA over one year using SCaA-SCT. The results confirmed that SCaA-SCT shows great agreement with manual segmentations, is a stable measure over one year, and estimations obtained from brain and spinal cord MRI are similar. This interview took place at the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) Congress 2022 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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