Barbara Brito Vega to present spinal cord MRI research at MSToronto2026

We are delighted to share that Barbara Brito Vega, a PhD student in the MS-PINPOINT group at UCL, has had her research accepted for presentation at MSToronto2026, the 10th Joint ACTRIMS–ECTRIMS Meeting, taking place in Toronto, Canada, from 21–23 October 2026.

ECTRIMS — the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis — runs the world's largest and most influential congress devoted to MS research and care, bringing together thousands of scientists, clinicians and healthcare professionals from across the globe each year. For 2026 it joins forces with its North American counterpart, ACTRIMS, for a single joint meeting, making it one of the most significant dates in the international MS calendar.

Barbara's accepted work, Quantifying Spinal Cord Upper Cervical Cross-sectional Area from Highly Heterogeneous Spinal MRI Scans, tackles a long-standing problem in MS imaging. The spinal cord is routinely scanned in MS care and cord area is a valuable marker of disability, yet it is rarely measured quantitatively because automated tools developed on pristine research data tend to underperform on the messy variety of real-world clinical MRI.

To address this, her research introduces a contrast-agnostic deep-learning model trained largely on synthetic data, enabling it to segment the spinal cord across many different MRI contrasts, resolutions and scanners. Tested in both a phase-3 progressive MS clinical trial and routine hospital scans, the approach measured upper cervical cord area more reliably than existing tools and remained meaningfully associated with clinical disability — paving the way for robust, real-world measurement of spinal cord atrophy as a biomarker in MS.

Barbara is a PhD student at UCL developing AI-enabled image-processing models for routine-care spinal cord MRI of people living with MS, as part of the EPSRC-funded i4Health Centre for Doctoral Training in collaboration with IXICO.

Congratulations, Barbara — we look forward to seeing the work presented in Toronto!