MRI Measures of Cervical Cord Atrophy and Water Content in Neuromyelitis Optica (P4.149)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess the presence of ongoing diffuse damage in the cervical cord of neuromyelitis optica (NMO) patients using indices of atrophy and water content. BACKGROUND: NMO is a severe disease of the optic nerves and spinal cord sharing many features with multiple sclerosis (MS). Disability is thought to result from attacks, rather than ongoing neurodegeneration between relapses. We aimed to evaluate longitudinal changes in atrophy and water content in NMO cervical cord. METHODS: 8 NMO patients, 11 relapsing MS patients and 14 matched healthy controls were scanned at baseline and one-year follow-up. All but one NMO and one MS patient had a history of transverse myelitis. A 3T MRI protocol was used to obtain measures of T1 (related to water content) voxelwise, and cord volume (C1-C7) normalized by length (CV), including lesioned tissue. Mean percentage difference from controls or percentage change over time ± standard deviation is reported (p-values determined using non-parametric statistics). RESULTS: At baseline, compared to controls, both patient groups had higher T1 (MS: +8.0±10.7[percnt], p=.04; NMO: +5.6±3.4[percnt], p=.02) and lower CV (MS: -6.9±8.0[percnt], p=.05; NMO: -9.3±11.8[percnt], p=.1 (not significant)). No longitudinal changes were observed in controls or MS patients (all p>.2). The NMO group showed a reduction in CV over one year of -5.1±4.6[percnt] (p=.02) and T1 decrease of -2.4±2.5[percnt] (p=.04). CONCLUSIONS: The changes seen in the NMO group follow an expected pattern. The observed decrease in CV is consistent with the atrophy known to occur at lesion sites. Elevated water content (T1) at baseline may be due to edema, loss of spinal microarchitecture, or cystic change. The decrease in T1, which was not seen in MS, can be explained by permanent tissue loss in lesioned areas, also responsible for cord shrinkage. Both observations are consistent with the more destructive pathology of NMO compared to MS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".