DTI of the Brain and Cervical Spine: Evaluation in Normal Subjects and Patients With Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy

More than half of the middle-aged population has radiologic evidence of cervical spondylosis (Irvine 1965) and a subset of this population develops cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM), a condition in which the spinal cord is impaired, either by direct mechanical compression or indirectly by arterial deprivation and/or venous stasis. In this study we aim to test the hypothesis that diffusion tensor imaging can provide prognostic information on the integrity of the spine in these patients which is unavailable from conventional MRI images