Personal Injury Law

Diffusion Tensor Imaging

By Bruce Stern

Attorneys throughout the United States are very excited about the advancement of diffusion tensor imaging that can objectively document mild traumatic brain damage in patients.  Recently, in South Carolina, attorneys were able to fight back a Daubert challenge to the introduction of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).  While the court never ruled on the defendant's motion to exclude, after the plaintiff filed their brief the case resolved. 
 
I recently reviewed an interesting article entitled 'Diffusion Tensor Imaging and White Matter Lesions at the Sub Acute Stage in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury with Persistent Neuro Behavioral Impairment.'  The lead author on the paper is Arnaud Messe, of the Laboratorie dImagerie Fonctionnelle Paris, France.  The French researchers investigated whether 'MRI at the subacute stage can detect lesions that are associated with poor functional outcomes in mild traumatic brain injury using anatomical images and DTI.  The authors compared 23 patients with mild TBI and 23 healthy volunteers.  All patients underwent an MRI investigation and clinical test between seven and 28 days and again between three and four months after injury.  Those with mild TBI were divided into two groups, those with poor outcome and those with good outcome based on their complaints at the three to four months investigation period.  The researchers found that the poor outcome patients showed 'significantly higher mean diffusivity values than both controls and good outcome patients in the corpus callosum and various other areas of the brain.  The researchers concluded that the poor outcome patients differed from good outcome patients by the presence of diffusion changes and long association white matter fiber tracts but not by gray matter partial volume.  The results suggest that DTI at the subacute stage may be a predictive marker of poor outcome in MTBI."

Full post as published by Traumatic Brain Injury Law Blog on August 16, 2010 (boomark / email).