MRI correlates of chronic symptoms in mild traumatic brain injury

TL;DR

This study uses advanced MRI techniques to identify brain abnormalities associated with persistent auditory and visual symptoms in veterans with mild traumatic brain injury, revealing potential biomarkers.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-parametric MRI approach combined with dimensionality reduction to distinguish mTBI patients from controls and correlate imaging metrics with symptoms.

Findings

Discriminates mTBI patients from healthy controls using MRI metrics

Identifies correlations between imaging features and clinical symptoms

Proposes potential imaging biomarkers for mTBI

Abstract

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.