Quantitative signal intensity of the spinal cord: predictors of suboptimal outcome of degenerative cervical myelopathy

This study involved 108 patients with DCM， we used signal change ratio (SCR) and the area ratio of ISI to quantitatively assess the changes of ISI on T2WI MRI. We aimed to identify the risk factors for suboptimal recovery after cervical decompression surgery for DCM and discuss whether quantitative measurements of ISI on both sagittal and axial T2-weighted MRI can predict surgical outcomes in patients with DCM.All the quantitative measurements of ISI were repeated three times by a signle observer, and the final data were expressed as average values.To assess the reliability of measurements, the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) two-way mixed model was used. An ICC greater than or equal to 0.75 was considered excellent. Area under the curve (AUC) is calculated using receiver operating characteristic curve analyses (ROC) to estimate the cut-off value of the pre-operative SCR and ISI area proportion as predictors of suboptimal surgical results. An AUC of >0.9 and 0.7–0.9 was considered to demonstrate excellent and good discriminatory performance, respectively. All tests were two-sided, and p-values of <0.05 were considered statistically significant. The statistical analyses were conducted with IBM SPSS Statistics (version 25.0, IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA).Sheet 1 is the 108 patient characteristics and operative datas and sheet 2 is the three times quantitative measurements of ISI by a signle observer.