@article{ref1,
title="White matter tract integrity: an indicator of axonal pathology after mild traumatic brain injury",
journal="Journal of neurotrauma",
year="2018",
author="Chung, Sohae and Fieremans, Els and Wang, Xiuyuan and Kucukboyaci, Nuri E. and Morton, Charles J. and Babb, James S. and Amorapanth, Prin and Foo, Farng-Yang and Novikov, Dmitry S. and Flanagan, Steven R. and Rath, Joseph F. and Lui, Yvonne W.",
volume="35",
number="8",
pages="1015-1020",
abstract="We seek to elucidate the underlying pathophysiology of injury sustained after mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) using multi-shell diffusion MRI, deriving compartment-specific WM tract integrity (WMTI) metrics. WMTI allows a more biophysical interpretation of WM changes by describing microstructural characteristics in both intra- and extra-axonal environments. Thirty-two patients with MTBI within 30 days of injury and twenty-one age- and sex-matched controls were imaged on a 3T MR scanner. Multi-shell diffusion acquisition was performed with 5 b-values (250 - 2500 s/mm<sup>2</sup>) along 6 - 60 diffusion encoding directions. Tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) was used with family-wise error (FWE) correction for multiple comparisons. TBSS results demonstrate focally lower intra-axonal diffusivity (D<sub>axon</sub>) in MTBI patients in the splenium of the corpus callosum (sCC) (p < 0.05, FWE-corrected). The Area Under the Curve (AUC)-value for was 0.76 with low sensitivity of 46.9%, but 100% specificity. These results indicate that D<sub>axon</sub> may be a useful imaging biomarker highly specific for MTBI-related WM injury. The observed decrease in D<sub>axon</sub> suggests restriction of the diffusion along the axons occurring shortly after injury.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0897-7151",
doi="10.1089/neu.2017.5320",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/neu.2017.5320"
}