Advanced MRI Scan Acquisition Metrics Improve Baseline Disease Severity Predictions Compared to Traditional Community MRI Scan Metrics

Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy (DCM) is the functional derangement of the spinal cord and acts as one of the most common atraumatic spinal cord injuries. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are key in confirming the diagnosis of DCM in patients, though the utilization of higher fidelity magnetic resonance imaging scans and their integration into machine learning models remains largely unexplored. This study looks at the predictive ability of common community MRI scans in comparison to high fidelity scans in disease diagnosis. We hypothesize that the utilization of higher fidelity "advanced" MRI scans will increase the effectiveness of machine learning models predicting DCM severity. Through the utilization of Random Forest Classifiers, we have been able to predict disease severity with 41.8% accuracy in current community MRI scans and 63.9% in the advanced MRI scans. Furthermore, across the different predictive model variations tested, the advanced MRI scans consistently produced higher prediction accuracies compared to the community MRI counterparts. These results support our hypothesis and indicate that machine learning models have the potential to predict disease severity. However, neither performed well enough to be considered for use in clinical practice, indicating that the utilization of more sophisticated machine models may be required for these purposes.