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7th Spinal Cord MRI Workshop

January 20th-21st, London

Fitting in with our principles of collaboration and collegiality, Spinal Research was proud to sponsor the 7th annual Spinal Cord MRI Workshop, which took place this year from Jan 20, 2020 - Jan 21, 2020, at University College London.

As in the previous edition, the general aim of this workshop is to bring together spinal cord MRI researchers and clinicians from around the world and discuss together and establish new collaborative solutions. The packed program took in such topics as 'Standardizing acquisition and processing of spinal cord MRI data' and 'Generalizing deep learning segmentation across multiple MRI contrasts and centers'.

You can find speakers, topics, and the times at which they spoke on the full program here: http://www.spinalcordmri.org/2020/01/20/workshop.html

Day 1

From Daniel Alexander (Director of Centre for Medical Image Computing) talking about The Centre for Medical Image Computing, to Jon Stutters (Queen Square Multiple Sclerosis Centre - UCL - UK) on data management lessons from a spinal cord study

Day 2

From Claudia Wheeler-Kingshott (Queen Square Multiple Sclerosis Centre - UCL - UK) discussing spinal cord as part of the central nervous system: advances in brain and spine acquisition to Frederik Barkhof (Centre for Medical Image Computing - UCL - UK) on spinal cord atrophy rates in randomised controlled trials

Outcomes

The 2020 workshop was a big success, with 83 participants coming from all over the world to share their expertise. Key scientific output:

  • Constructive discussions on how to how measure spinal cord cross sectional area, which is a relevant biomarker for MS. Several software were evaluated, including SCT and JIM.
  • The "spine generic MRI protocol" is finalised and available here http://www.spinalcordmri.org/protocols.
  • This project led to the establishment of normative values of quantitative MRI of the spinal cord, and will be presented at ISMRM'2020.