Ganga Hospital research team bags ISSLS award for best spine research

Ganga Hospital team wins 2025 ISSLS award for groundbreaking spine research using FLASH MRI to detect disc degeneration.

A team of spine surgeons and radiologists of Coimbatore-based Ganga Hospital has bagged an award for the best spine research for 2025, instituted by the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine (ISSLS), Canada.

The research work ‘Cartilage End Plate Defects Precede and Initiate Bony End Plate Defects and Disc Degeneration – An Integrated Total End Plate Score to Identify Preclinical Discs at Risk for Degeneration’ has won the award.

A release from the hospital said the work used flash low-angle shot (FLASH) MRI sequence to identify the status and severity of damage of the cartilage end plate. An ‘Integrated Total End Plate Score’ was developed to identify the changes in cartilage and bony end plates.

The highlight of the study was that it showed cartilage end plate defects to occur much before the changes in the bony end plate or changes in Pfirrmann grade of degeneration. This allowed the team to identify the discs, which are undergoing degeneration at the molecular level but still appearing normal in MRI. These discs may be the right cohort for regenerative therapy, it said.

S. Rajasekaran, chairman, Department of Orthopaedics, Trauma and Spine Surgery at Ganga Hospital headed the research team comprising B.T. Pushpa, Gnanaprakash Gurusamy, Karthik Ramachandran, T.A. Yirdaw, S. Basu, J.S. Kamodia, A.M. Abdelwahed, S.V. Anand, Ajoy Prasad Shetty and Rishi M. Kanna.

The award carries a cash prize of $20,000 and the paper will be published as a lead scientific article in the European Spine Journal. The paper will also be presented in a plenary session during the annual meeting of ISSLS to be held from May 12 to 16 in Atlanta, USA.

Ganga Hospital has reportedly won ISSLS awards five times before, and the North American Spine Society’s outstanding research award continuously for four years from 2019 to 2022, said the release.