Citation

Chung S, Fieremans E, Wang X, Kucukboyaci NE, Morton CJ, Babb JS, Amorapanth P, Foo FY, Novikov DS, Flanagan SR, Rath JF, Lui YW. J. Neurotrauma 2018; 35(8): 1015-1020.

Affiliation

New York University School of Medicine, 12296, Bernard and Irene Schwartz Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, New York, New York, United States ; yvonne.lui@nyumc.org.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Mary Ann Liebert Publishers)

DOI

10.1089/neu.2017.5320

PMID

29239261

Abstract

We seek to elucidate the underlying pathophysiology of injury sustained after mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) using multi-shell diffusion MRI, deriving compartment-specific WM tract integrity (WMTI) metrics. WMTI allows a more biophysical interpretation of WM changes by describing microstructural characteristics in both intra- and extra-axonal environments. Thirty-two patients with MTBI within 30 days of injury and twenty-one age- and sex-matched controls were imaged on a 3T MR scanner. Multi-shell diffusion acquisition was performed with 5 b-values (250 - 2500 s/mm²) along 6 - 60 diffusion encoding directions. Tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) was used with family-wise error (FWE) correction for multiple comparisons. TBSS results demonstrate focally lower intra-axonal diffusivity (D_axon) in MTBI patients in the splenium of the corpus callosum (sCC) (p < 0.05, FWE-corrected). The Area Under the Curve (AUC)-value for was 0.76 with low sensitivity of 46.9%, but 100% specificity. These results indicate that D_axon may be a useful imaging biomarker highly specific for MTBI-related WM injury. The observed decrease in D_axon suggests restriction of the diffusion along the axons occurring shortly after injury.

Language: en

Keywords

ADULT BRAIN INJURY; MRI; TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY