MRI-DTI Tractography to Quantify Brain Connectivity in Traumatic Brain Injury

摘要

Accurate diagnosis of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and prediction of outcome following treatment is a key factor in head-trauma management. One of the serious consequences of TBI is diffuse axonal injury (DAI). Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) based Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is an ideal modality to detect DAI as DTI can detect and quantify small alterations in local diffusion patterns due to axonal injury. Preliminary analysis of DTI data acquired from TBI patients and 10 normal control subjects suggests that (1) it is possible to detect, localize and quantify injured regions with high statistical significance by comparing the voxellated diffusion anisotropy maps of individual TBI patients to those of the control group after all data have been normalized, and (2) it is possible to identify brain pathways disrupted by injury and to quantify disruptions in individual subjects by DTI tractography. This quantification provides a metric to monitor the longitudinal progression of TBI in response to treatment.