Straightening the spinal Cord using fibre tractography

Spinal Cord MRI (SC-MRI) is a challenging research field with numerous important clinical and basic research applications. Some of the SC-MRI applications strongly need to deal with a well straightened spinal cord either for appropriate methodological developments, for better visualization or diagnostic purposes. In this article, we develop an efficient and automatic method to straighten the spinal cord image and fibres. Diffusion Tensor MRI is first used to recover by tractography the bundles of fibres contained in the spinal cord white matter. An efficient Gaussian process framework is then used to automatically recover in a robust way the most representative fibre which is used to interpolate and straighten the spinal cord image and fibres. Our method is successfully tested on real images of one cat with partial spinal cord injury and two healthy volunteers. This capability to reliably reconstruct straightened animal and human spinal cord opens new opportunities for SC-MRI research.