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. 2022 Oct 3;12:16498. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-20395-1

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Visual representation of echoes, echo combinations, signal averages, and image segmentations. The 3D spoiled multi-echo gradient echo sequence (Siemens FLASH) consisted of 5 echoes and was acquired with 8 individual repetitions. For each subject, a series of images was created by successively combining echoes (echo 1, 1–2, 1–3, 1–4, 1–5) and averaging across repetitions (number of signal averages (NSA): 1, 2, 3, …, 8), resulting in a total of 72 images. (A) Image series of individual echoes (NSA = 8) for a representative slice in the lumbosacral enlargement (LSE). (B) Image series of increasing number of combined echoes in the same slice as in (A) (NSA = 8). (C) Image series with increasing NSA (3 combined echoes). (D) Spinal cord (SC) and gray matter (GM) were segmented manually in each slice (here a representative LSE and conus medullaris slice are shown). A mask of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) was drawn anterior to the SC. White matter (WM) mask was obtained by subtracting GM from the SC mask.