A new study published in Spine examines whether MRI parameters help clinicians predict functional outcomes in surgical patients with degenerative cervical myelopathy.
There were 114 patients assessed with MRI from a cohort of 278 patients enrolled in the AOSpine CSM-North America Study. There were 99 patients with complete preoperative imaging and postoperative outcomes data.
The researchers found:
1. The area under the receiver operator curve was 0.811.
2. Adding imaging variables didn't significantly improve the predictive performance.
3. There were small prediction improvements when sagittal extent of T2 hyperintensity or Wang ratio was added.
4. The anatomic characteristics like maximum canal compromise and maximum cord compression didn't improve the discriminative ability of the clinical prediction model.
5. The researchers concluded MRI parameters "do not significantly add to the predictive performance of a previously published clinical prediction rule." However, it's plausible that some combinations of the strongest clinical and MRI predictors could yield a similar or better prediction model.