The Journal of Neurosurgery recently published an article addressing the difficulty in locating and determining the extent of traumatic brain injury (TBI), noting current technologies generally do not “provide highly detailed information about the location of axonal injury, severity of injury, or expected recovery.” An Associated Press article explains that if doctors cannot “see or quantify the damage, it is hard to treat it.”
However, a new imaging technology may allow doctors to literally gain a far more complete picture of these injuries. The AP explains this new tool “lights up the breaks these injuries leave deep in the brain’s wiring, much like X-rays show broken bones,” allowing doctors to better evaluate and treat injured patients and greatly improve the recovery process.
According to the AP, around 1.7 million people in the U.S. suffer a TBI each year. The military estimates this includes more than 200,000 Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans. Unfortunately, current tests cannot always identify these injuries, which can lead to patient and doctor frustration.
TBI patients may experience significant side effects like mood change or memory loss but have no signs of damage appear on their medical scans. Furthermore, the AP explains that “with more serious head injuries, standard scans cannot see beyond bleeding or swelling to tell if the brain’s connections are broken in a way it can’t repair on its own.”
Some patients with severe brain swelling go on to have a normal recovery, while others pass away. The current methods of testing fail to indicate what the consequences of a head injury are going to be. To help better diagnose and treat patients with head injuries, doctors are testing this new scan called high-definition fiber tracking (HDFT).
The AP story notes that brain cells communicate “through a system of axons, or nerve fibers, that acts like a telephone network.” Cells travel along these fiber tracts, which have millions of connections and make up the brain’s white matter.
The new scan uses high-powered MRIs and a special computer program to create a color coded map of these fiber pathways. By using this technology to brightly highlight these tracts, doctors will have the ability to identify fiber breaks that may slow or completely stop “those nerve connections from doing their assigned job,” the AP reports.
With this technology, doctors can receive a far more detailed picture of the brain’s fiber tracts than ever before. This will allow them to compare images of injured fiber tracts to those healthy individuals, as well as measure left/right asymmetries to “identify white matter damage following TBI.”
After testing this advanced scan on a TBI patient recently, researchers noted in the Journal of Neurosurgery that “This novel approach successfully detected, visualized, and quantified damage when previous methods (CT, structural MRI, and DTI) did not provide these details.” Researchers point out that further study of individuals with high TBI risks, like soldiers and athletes, could help offer additional support for this new technology.
The AP notes this is not the only emerging technology to better aid in the evaluation and treatment of TBI patients. A new CT scan being studied by the military detects TBI by measuring changes in brain blood flow, while the National Institutes of Health is “funding a search for substances that might leak into the bloodstream after a brain injury.”
With these promising techniques on the horizon, future TBI patients have a far greater chance of making a strong recovery by harnessing this technology to guide the healing process.