Quantifying White Matter Damage in Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common etiology of cognitive dysfunction, with serious personal and societal costs. Neuropsychological testing can delineate cognitive deficits, but an imaging-based quantification scheme does not presently exist. In this study, researchers used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), an MRI-based technique that can assess white matter integrity and morphology, to define a quantitative association between DTI measures of white matter injury and neuropsychological variables across the spectrum of injury severity in chronic TBI (>6 months postinjury). The authors looked for correlations between measurements of neuropsychological function in three domains — attention, memory, and executive function — and DTI changes i…