Improved tissue integrity after alginate treatment in rat spinal cord injury: evidence from ex vivo diffusion tensor imaging.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a magnetic resonance imaging technique used to characterize fibrous structures such as white matter in the central nervous system, including normal and spinal cord injury (SCI) conditions. Our aim was to evaluate the effect of alginate treatment in the rat SCI by DTI parametric measures. Ex vivo DTI data were collected by spin echo sequence with following parameters TR/TE: 2500 ms/32 ms and b-value of 1500 s/mm2. Main significant changes were found in fractional anisotropy (FA), and radial diffusivity (RD), between the saline- and alginatetreated group at the level of individual sections and whole spinal cord. Results indicate that ex vivo DTI can be used as a tool for tissue structure characterisation and both FA and RD as promising prognostic parameters of SCI treatment.