MR Diffusion Tensor Imaging and Fiber Tracking in 5 Spinal Cord Astrocytomas

SUMMARY: Spinal cord astrocytomas are rare neoplasms that can result in alteration of the spinal cord structural integrity, which can be assessed by using diffusion tensor imaging methods. Our objective was to visualize the deformation of the posterior spinal cord lemniscal and corticospinal tracts in 5 patients with low-grade astrocytomas compared with 10 healthy volunteers by using 3D fiber-tracking reconstructions. Intrinsic tumors of the spinal cord (approximately 15%–20%of all central nervous system [CNS] tumors) are rare neo-plasms (incidence of 1.1/100,000 persons),1 among which as-trocytomas are the most frequent type (29%). Preliminary studies2-4 previously assessed the feasibility of MR spinal cord imaging by using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), anMR tech-nique that evaluates the translation of extracellular watermol-ecules within the white matter fibers5 and enables reconstruc-tion of 3D images in the brain6 and spinal cord4,7 of white matter tracts by using specialized fiber-tracking (FT) algo-rithms. We applied this technique in 5 patients with spina