Personal Injury Law

Do Changes In Cerebral Tissue Caused By TBI Correlate With Diffusion Tensor Imaging Findings?

By Bruce Stern

Researchers from Finland recently investigated whether texture analysis can detect subtle changes in cerebral tissue caused by mild traumatic brain injury and whether these changes correlate with neuropsychological and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) findings.  The researchers studied 42 patients with MTBI using 1.5-T MRI imaging within three weeks after injury. According to the abstract, texture analysis was performed for the regions corresponding to the mesencephalon, centrum semiovale, and corpus callosum.  Using DTI, the fractional anisotropic and apparent diffusion coefficient values for the same regions were evaluated. The same analyses were performed on a group of ten healthy volunteers.  Patients also underwent a battery of neuro cognitive tests within six weeks after injury.
 
The researchers found that texture analysis revealed textural differences between the right and left hemispheres in patients with MTBIs, whereas, differences were minimal in health controls.  A significant correlation was found between scores on memory tests and texture parameters in patients in the area of the mesencephalon and the genu of the corpus callosum.  Significant correlations were also found between texture parameters for the left mesencephalon and both fractional anisotropic and apparent diffusion coefficient values. 
 
The researchers concluded that the data suggests that heterogeneous texture and abnormal DTI patterns in the area of the mesencephalon maybe linked with verbal memory deficits among patients with MTBIs. 
 
Dr. Holli and his colleagues also studied whether mild trauma may cause micro structural changes in the brain which were not necessarily perceptible by visual inspection but could be detected with texture analysis. Again, the researchers using the same 1.5T  MRI imaging, 42 MTBI patients within three weeks of onset of trauma.  The textural analysis revealed significant changes in texture parameters of cerebral tissue between hemispheres and corpus callosum segments in TBI patients.  The authors concluded the textural analysis may serve as a novel additional tool for detecting the conventionally invisible changes in cerebral tissue in MTBI and help the clinicians to make an early diagnosis. 

Full post as published by Traumatic Brain Injury Law Blog on August 23, 2010 (boomark / email).