Chiari I Malformation clinical trials

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Spine

Diffusion-weighted (DW) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging is a well established method for detecting acute injury to the brain and is used on all children undergoing an MRI brain scan at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. The possibility of using DW MRI to study other areas of the body, such as the spinal cord, has been recognised as having great clinical potential. However, two main problems have hindered the clinical application of the technique; firstly, the extreme motion sensitivity of the technique meant that respiratory motion have hampered clinical studies. Secondly, the close proximity of the spinal cord to the bones in the spinal column complicates the application of the techniques developed for the brain to the spine. Recently, several techniques have been developed which address these problems and these are now available on the MRI scanners used at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. We now wish to evaluate how well these techniques work on children in a routine clinical setting. For this reason we wish to add a single scan of the spine to the imaging protocol of children receiving a routine scan of the brain or spine. This will permit us to evaluate the image quality in both normal and abnormal spines. We plan on enrolling 60 patients with normal spines and 30 patients with abnormal spines. No additional sedation and/or contrast will be required and the additional imaging time for the diffusion studies will be less than 10 minutes. Parental consent will be a pre-requisite for any patient to be enrolled into the study.