MRI correlates of chronic symptoms in mild traumatic brain injury
This addresses the difficulty in diagnosing chronic symptoms in mTBI patients, but it is incremental as it builds on existing imaging hypotheses.
The study tackled the problem of characterizing persistent auditory and visual dysfunction in veterans with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) using multi-parametric MRI, finding that over 1,000 imaging and clinical metrics could discriminate between healthy controls and mTBI patients and correlate with symptoms.
Veterans with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) have reported auditory and visual dysfunction that persists beyond the acute incident. The etiology behind these symptoms is difficult to characterize with current clinical imaging. These functional deficits may be caused by shear injury or micro-bleeds, which can be detected with special imaging modalities. We explore these hypotheses in a pilot study of multi-parametric MRI. We extract over 1,000 imaging and clinical metrics and project them to a low-dimensional space, where we can discriminate between healthy controls and patients with mTBI. We also show correlations between the metric representations and patient symptoms.