Quantitative mapping of the intervertebral disc

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Degenerative disk disease (DDD) is a serious musculoskeletal disorder challenging our health system and includes a number of clinical diagnoses such as mechanical cervical and lumbar pain, degenerative scoliosis and spinal stenosis. A novel MRI pulse sequence design for quantitative tissue diagnosis using magic echo relaxation mapping has emerged - this technique may be superior to current T2 relaxation mapping. This strategy is particularly sensitive to water molecules bound and intermediately bound toglycosaminoglycans in the nucleus pulposus and may serve as an early-stage reporter of structural changes associated with DDD. We suspect that magic echo relaxation mapping correlates with the macromolecular content of the intervertebral disc and can detect biochemical and biomechanical changes that precede DDD morphological changes. Our long-term specific aims include (i) a measurement of the precision and spatial distribution of magic echo relaxation times in both healthy and proteoglycan-depleted bovine and human cadaveric specimans, (ii) a test for correlation between magic echo relaxation times and changes observed in tissue biochemistry andbiomechanics. We also propose to quantify the proton-proton dipolar coupling constant among compartments of the intervertebral disc. Relevance to public health lower back pain is a significant medical and economical burden in the United States. For among 90% of individuals with lower back pain, however, the source of the pain cannot be identified and a specific diagnosis is not possible. We employ quantitative magic echo relaxation mapping to observe the biochemical and structural changes that occur during degenerative disc disease in the hope that we may quantify these changes earlier and with even greater sensitivity than the current discographic techniques.