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Barbara Brito Vega presents her spinal cord MRI poster at MSToronto 2026
MS-PINPOINT PhD student Barbara Brito Vega presented her poster on measuring upper cervical spinal cord area from highly heterogeneous routine MRI at MSToronto 2026, the joint ECTRIMS–ACTRIMS congress in Toronto.
Written byMS-PINPOINT TeamPublished
Barbara Brito Vega, a PhD student in the MS-PINPOINT group at UCL, presented her poster at MSToronto 2026, the joint ECTRIMS–ACTRIMS congress taking place in Toronto, Canada, from 20–23 October 2026. She presented poster P0185 in Poster Session 1 on Wednesday 21 October, in Exhibit Hall DE.
Her poster, Quantifying Spinal Cord Upper Cervical Cross-sectional Area from Highly Heterogeneous Spinal MRI Scans, asks a practical question: can a spinal cord segmentation model trained on synthetic MRI generated from just 100 labelled scans give cord measures that stay associated with disability in routine MRI?
The answer on the poster is yes. Using only 100 labelled scans, the upper cervical cord measures stayed associated with disability on routine clinical MRI. Spinal cord MRI is collected routinely in MS care but is rarely measured quantitatively, so this is a step towards making cord atrophy a measure that can be used on the ordinary, varied scans hospitals already hold — the kind of real-world robustness MS-PINPOINT is working towards.
The poster comes from the UCL Hawkes Institute and acknowledges MS-PINPOINT. You can read more about the project in our earlier announcement.
Congratulations, Barbara!
