Consensus acquisition protocol for quantitative MRI of the cervical spinal cord at 3T

We present a consensus recommendation for best practices in high quality data acquisition of quantitative MRI (qMRI) of the cervical spinal cord at 3T. We propose protocols for computing cross-sectional area (CSA), magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) from three main vendors. We demonstrate these protocols by repeated scans of a single subject, from which the data and analysis scripts are made available. We hope harmonized and publicly-available spinal cord imaging protocols will promote reproducibility and thus accelerate the progress for spinal cord measurements to be more widely accepted as MRI biomarkers in multicenter studies.