Abstract
Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating condition characterized by long-term motor and sensory neurological deficits, severely affecting the life of patients and their families. Although emerging therapeutic strategies focused on functional recovery are being explored, their development and translation to clinical use are severely limited by the lack of functional, objective, and non-invasive imaging biomarkers. Without quantifiable prognostic biomarkers, the clinical heterogeneity between SCI patients limits healthcare workers' qualitative measure of the potential future functional recovery. Using clinically relevant rat models, we propose a multimodal neuroimaging approach focused on synaptic and white matter markers to determine the prognostic and predictive outcome of (non)traumatic SCI. Longitudinal imaging with positron emission tomography (PET, for synaptic marker) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, for inflammation and white matter integrity) will be used for the establishment of a multimodal imaging platform to define lesions affecting the spinal cord to ultimately provide meaningful information related to lesion severity, functional outcome, and predictive value in a therapeutic context. Our platform will facilitate the interpretation of therapeutic results in preclinical studies, supporting the identification of most responsive treatment approaches and thus lowering the risks and costs for pharmaceutical companies' interest in the clinical translation of SCI.
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