Fig. 1.

Cervical spinal cord segmentation. 1) A control subject was appointed as template for spinal cord segmentation. 2) The initial segmenting starting point derived on the template was brought to individual space and used to segment the spinal cord of each subject. 3) For each subject, borders of the cervical spinal cord segments were identified as the center of intervertebral disks. 4) The cross-sectional area (CSA) of each segmentation slice was computed and averaged over the first three cervical segments (UCSC) or for individual segments (C1–C4).