Joshua Ng1, Michael Wahl1, Elizabeth Tong1, Hana Lee2, Srivathsa Veeraraghavan1, Duan Xu1, Shoujun Zhao1, John Kornak1, Michele Meeker2, Jamshid Ghajar3, Geoffrey T. Manley2, Pratik Mukherjee1
1Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; 3Brain Trauma Foundation, New York, NY, USA
With 1.4 million Americans suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year, the vast majority of which is mild TBI, better diagnosis is needed for treatment planning. In this study, quantitative DTI tractography at 3T detected reduced microstructural integrity of several white matter tracts with prefrontal connectivity in 31 mild TBI patients compared to 19 matched controls. Trends toward decreasing microstructural integrity were identified in almost all investigated white matter tracts between 1 month and 1 year after injury, but these did not reach statistical significance in this initial study.