Sat Feb 15 18:20:26 UTC 2025: ## Coimbatore Hospital Wins Prestigious Spine Research Award

**COIMBATORE, INDIA (February 15, 2025)** – A team of spine surgeons and radiologists from Ganga Hospital in Coimbatore has been awarded the 2025 prize for best spine research by the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine (ISSLS) in Canada. The award recognizes their groundbreaking research, “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.”

Using advanced FLASH MRI technology, the Ganga Hospital team developed an “Integrated Total End Plate Score” to assess cartilage and bony end plate damage. Their key finding demonstrates that cartilage end plate defects appear significantly earlier than changes in the bony end plate or Pfirrmann grade degeneration. This allows for the identification of discs undergoing molecular-level degeneration that still appear healthy on standard MRI scans. These early-stage discs represent potential candidates for regenerative therapies.

The research was led by Dr. S. Rajasekaran, chairman of the Department of Orthopaedics, Trauma and Spine Surgery at Ganga Hospital, and involved a team of nine researchers. The $20,000 award comes with publication of their findings as a lead article in the *European Spine Journal*, and presentation at the ISSLS annual meeting in Atlanta, USA (May 12-16).

This marks Ganga Hospital’s fifth ISSLS award and follows four consecutive years of receiving the North American Spine Society’s outstanding research award (2019-2022).

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