Structural connectivity disruptions after traumatic brain injury

In each hemisphere of the brain, the thalamus and three cortical subregions in the prefrontal cortex were identified and used along with diffusion tensor based fiber tractography to model the white matter fiber bundles that connect the thalamus to each cortical region.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most common causes of long-term disability. Each year, approximately 1.5 million people sustain TBI in the United States alone, causing billions of dollars of economic cost. Among the survivors, many individuals are left with significant long-term cognitive and motor disabilities. However, efforts to identify the neuropathologic correlates of these deficits have gained only limited success to date. The use of more sensitive and reliable in vivo neuroimaging protocols may facilitate the identification of specific brain-behavior relationships in the TBI population. Here we present a study that explores novel methodologies for examining neuroimaging data to gain further insight into TBI.

Two different types of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) are used: diffusion tensor (DT) images quantify connectivity patterns in the brain while the T1 modality provides high-resolution images of tissue interfaces. Our objective is to use both modalities to build subject-specific, quantitative models of fiber connections in order to discover effects specific to a neural system. We first use a population-specific average T1 and DT template to label the thalamus and cortical regions of interest. We then build an expected connection model (illustrated above) within this template space that is transferred to subject space in order to provide a prior restriction on probabilistic tracking performed in subject space. This allows for the comparison of properties such as fractional anisotropy (FA) within a common framework along fiber pathways.

Students t-test results after FDR correction at p<0.02 indicate that the left hemisphere connection between thalamus and Brodmann area 10 is affected by TBI. Arrows indicate regions where TBI survivors show reduced FA compared to controls. A sagittal slice from the T1 component of the template is shown for anatomical reference.

J. T. Duda, B. B. Avants, J. Kim, H. Zhang, S. Patel, J. Whyte, and J. C. Gee, “Multivariate Analysis of Thalamo-Cortical Connectivity Loss in TBI,” in Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Ninth IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Mathematical Methods in Biomedical Image Analysis (MMBIA), Anchorage, AK, 2008.

 

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