1School
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette,
IN, United States; 23Department of Health and Kinesiology, Purdue
University, West Lafayette, IN, United States; 3School of
Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States;
4Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West
Lafayette, IN, United States
Building on our study of repetitive blows in contact sports, we introduce a bootstrapped z-score analysis as a robust voxel-wise statistical analysis method to detect deviations from normal white matter fractional anisotropy. With this approach, we evaluate the progression of changes in fractional anisotropy (FA) over time, using DW-MRI scans from pre-season to post-season. These changes provide strong evidence that contact sports athletes, especially American football players, who receive many blows to the head during the season, exhibit likely chronic white matter injuries.