Functional Imaging of the Human Spinal Cord

Functional imaging of the human spinal cord has emerged as a vital complement to brain imaging, enabling non-invasive mapping of sensory, motor and autonomic pathways within the central nervous system. Although the spinal cord presents unique challenges—small cross-sectional area, physiological noise from cardiac and respiratory cycles, and magnetic field inhomogeneities—advances in magnetic resonance technology and specialised acquisition protocols have improved spatial and temporal resolution. Both task-based and resting-state paradigms now reveal coherent activity in dorsal (sensory) and ventral (motor) horns, demonstrate segmental organisation and track plastic changes after learning or injury. This body of work promises to enhance understanding of spinal processing in health and disease, guide personalised diagnostics and inform rehabilitation strategies for spinal cord injury and neurodegenerative disorders.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Resting-state investigations at clinically prevalent field strengths have demonstrated reliable synchronous fluctuations between ventral and dorsal horns in the lumbar spinal cord, confirming the feasibility of probing functional connectivity in vivo on widely available 3 T systems. Group-level independent component analyses reveal anatomically coherent networks corresponding to bilateral motor and sensory subdivisions, and these components are robust across subsets of participants. In parallel, validation studies in non-human primates have correlated blood-oxygen-level-dependent signals with electrophysiological recordings, showing that stimulus-evoked and spontaneous spinal cord activity co-localise to dorsal horn regions and that resting-state correlations faithfully reflect underlying neuronal dynamics. Together, these works establish the intrinsic functional architecture of spinal segments and affirm the physiological basis of fMRI measurements in the cord.

Functional Imaging of the Human Spinal Cord publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in functional imaging of the human spinal cord across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Functional MRI (fMRI): A non-invasive imaging technique that measures haemodynamic responses related to neural activity by detecting changes in blood oxygenation.

Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast: The MRI signal mechanism underlying fMRI, sensitive to the ratio of oxygenated to deoxygenated haemoglobin.

Resting-state functional connectivity: Statistical correlations between spontaneous BOLD signal fluctuations in anatomically separate regions when the subject is not performing an explicit task.

Seed-based correlation: An analysis method that computes the temporal correlation of BOLD signals between a predefined region of interest (seed) and all other voxels.

Independent component analysis (ICA): A computational technique that separates mixed signals into spatially independent components, used to identify coherent functional networks.

Functional parcellation: The division of neural tissue into distinct regions based on shared functional characteristics, such as similar connectivity profiles or activation patterns.

References

1. Detection of resting-state functional connectivity in the lumbar spinal cord with 3T MRI. Scientific Reports (2023).
2. Intrinsic functional architecture of the non-human primate spinal cord derived from fMRI and electrophysiology. Nature Communications (2019).
3. In vivo parcellation of the human spinal cord functional architecture. Imaging Neuroscience (2024).
4. Decoding cerebro-spinal signatures of human behavior: Application to motor sequence learning. NeuroImage (2023).