calculation.tex

\section{Proposed Analysis}
This project uses existing \dmri scans of 10 spinal cords that were donated to the International Spinal Cord Biobank by people who suffered fatal spinal cord injuries that have been analyzed according to the diffusion models DTI, DKI, and SMT, as well as the biophysical models NODDI, ActiveAx, and DBSI. The goal of this project is to investigate the resulting parameters from the previous analyses and finding correlations that are indicators of \sci by comparing areas of healthy tissue to areas of damaged tissue. This will involve first registering the \dmri data to the atlas of the spinal cord from Sengul et al. \cite{sengul2013atlas} and generating regions of interest. The regions we are interested in segmenting the regions of white matter, grey matter, the ascending tracks, and the descending tracks. We will also separate healthy tissue from regions with Wallerian degeneration and the epicenter of the injury.

From this we will correlate \dmri metrics across healthy and damaged tissue, trace metrics across the epicenter to study the nature of the damage in three dimensions, determine which models are the most useful for detecting and distinguishing reigions of Wallerian degeneration, and examine if fixed models parameters are appropriate in \sci tissue.