ArticleNeuroImage2020
Assessing the spatial distribution of cervical spinal cord activity during tactile stimulation of the upper extremity in humans with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Article in NeuroImage, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Test-Retest Reliability of Sensorimotor Activity Measured With Spinal Cord fMRI.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Spatial distribution of spinal cord fMRI activity with electrocutaneous stimulation.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Spatial distribution of spinal cord fMRI activity with electrocutaneous stimulation.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- SpIC3D imaging for spinal in situ contrast 3D visualization.Cell reports methods · 2025Article
- Mapping Human Proprioceptive Projections of Upper Limb Muscles Through Spinal Cord fMRI.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Human spinal cord activation during filling and emptying of the bladder.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Prior knowledge changes initial sensory processing in the human spinal cord.Science advances · 2025Article
- EPISeg: Automated segmentation of the spinal cord on echo planar images using open-access multi-center data.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Towards personalized mapping through lumbosacral spinal cord task fMRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Influence of scanning plane on Human Spinal Cord functional Magnetic Resonance echo planar imaging.PloS one · 2025Article
- Thermal stimulus task fMRI in the cervical spinal cord at 7 Tesla.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the lumbosacral cord during a lower extremity motor task.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Automatic segmentation of the spinal cord nerve rootlets.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Cerebro-spinal somatotopic organization uncovered through functional connectivity mapping.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Spinal Cord fMRI: A New Window into the Central Nervous System.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2023Review
- Multisensory integration in humans with spinal cord injury.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Automated slice-specific z-shimming for functional magnetic resonance imaging of the human spinal cord.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Lateral Corticospinal Tract and Dorsal Column Damage: Predictive Relationships With Motor and Sensory Scores at Discharge From Acute Rehabilitation After Spinal Cord Injury.Archives of physical medicine and rehabilitation · 2022Article
- Effects of variability in manually contoured spinal cord masks on fMRI co-registration and interpretation.Frontiers in neurology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Dermatomal maps are a mainstay of clinical practice and provide information on the spatial distribution of the cutaneous innervation of spinal nerves. Dermatomal deficits can help isolate the level of spinal nerve root involvement in spinal conditions and guide clinicians in diagnosis and treatment. Dermatomal maps, however, have limitations, and the spatial distribution of spinal cord sensory activity in humans remains to be quantitatively assessed. Here we used spinal cord functional MRI to map and quantitatively compare the spatial distribution of sensory spinal cord activity during tactile stimulation of the left and right lateral shoulders (i.e. C5 dermatome) and dorsal third digits of the hands (i.e., C7 dermatome) in healthy humans (n = 24, age = 36.8 ± 11.8 years). Based on the central sites for processing of innocuous tactile sensory information, we hypothesized that the activity would be localized more to the ipsilateral dorsal spinal cord with the lateral shoulder stimulation activity being localized more superiorly than the dorsal third digit. The findings demonstrate lateralization of the activity with the left- and right-sided stimuli having more activation in the ipsilateral hemicord. Contradictory to our hypotheses, the activity for both stimulation sites was spread across the dorsal and ventral hemicords and did not demonstrate a clear superior-inferior localization. Instead, the activity for both stimuli had a broader than expected distribution, extending across the C5, C6, and C7 spinal cord segments. We highlight the complexity of the human spinal cord neuroanatomy and several sources of variability that may explain the observed patterns of activity. While the findings were not completely consistent with our a priori hypotheses, this study provides a foundation for continued work and is an important step towards developing normative quantitative spinal cord measures of sensory function, which may become useful objective MRI-based biomarkers of neurological injury and improve the management of spinal disorders.
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