Review of the Evidence Supporting the Medical and Legal Use of NeuroQuant® in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

摘要

Decades of research have shown that the brain atrophies after traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, multiple practical issues made it difficult to detect brain atrophy in individual patients with mild to moderate TBI. This situation improved by 2007 with the FDA approval of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. Several peer-reviewed scientific studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant®. This review addresses whether NeuroQuant® meets the Daubert standard for admissibility in court cases involving persons with TBI. The review finds that NeuroQuant® is an objective, reliable, and practical means of measuring brain volume and therefore can be an important tool for measuring the effects of TBI on brain volume in clinical or medicolegal settings.