Each year, upwards of 1.5 million cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI) occur in the United States. Conventional imaging methods don't always provide physicians with as much detail as they would like when it comes to determining how the injury damaged the patient's brain tissue, predicting how the patient would fare, or planning rehabilitation to maximize recovery. Now, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, a powerful new imaging technique called High Definition Fiber Tracking (HDFT) might allow doctors to see broken neural connections more clearly than ever before, much like an X-ray shows a fractured bone.
In experiments, HDFT has been able to identify disruptions in neural pathways with unprecedented clarity, according to researchers. Data from sophisticated MRI scanners is processed through computer algorithms to reveal the wiring of the brain in vivid detail and to pinpoint breaks in the cables, called fiber tracts. Each tract contains millions of neuronal connections.
“With it, we can virtually dissect 40 major fiber tracts in the brain to find damaged areas and quantify the proportion of fibers lost relative to the uninjured side of the brain or to the brains of healthy individuals. Now, we can clearly see breaks and identify which parts of the brain have lost connections," said Dr. Walter Schneider, professor of psychology at Pitt's Learning Research and Development Center, and co-senior author of the study. In the past, conventional scans sometimes showed improvement even as the patient continued to struggle; HDFT could offer a better window into the reason for this apparent disparity.
Read about another innovation for TBI patients: the Infrascanner , a handheld non-invasive brain hematoma detector that could allow patients to be treated more quickly, especially in rural areas of the U.S. or underdeveloped areas of the world.
