With considerable fanfare, GE and the NFL announced 16 winners of $20 million in grants to help researchers "speed diagnosis and improve treatment for mild traumatic brain injury."
But the winners of the "Head Health Challenge," which were announced Jan. 23, are all involved in imaging technology, so the grants are heavy on diagnosis, but none of the money is directed at improving treatment.
This first round of grant funds comprises one-third of the 4-year purse. The recipients will focus on one of three diagnostic and prognostic areas: development of rapid blood tests to identify biomarkers related to brain injuries, advances in brain imaging technology, and injury tracking.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, led by Walter Schneider, PhD, will put their grant towards further development of an imaging analysis tool known as High Definition Fiber-Tracking (HDFT).
Schneider told MedPage Today that the HDFT scan allows physicians to see a 3-dimensional image of broken fiber tracts along the cortical systems much in the way bone breaks are spotted with an x-ray.
"We need to first identify it [the point of injury], quantify the extent of it, compare it to normative data, and then we're in a position to better understand the nature of the anatomical breaks for a given tract or cable in the brain," Schneider told MedPage Today.
HDFT analysis is applied to 3T MRI scans to measure the water volume inside the tubular axons that comprise the main 40 fiber tracts in the brain. After roughly 2 to 4 hours of processing the MRI scan, the HDFT tool produces fiber tract renderings.
Through these renderings, Schneider explained, physicians can identify and quantify "anomalies," such as breaks or asymmetries, by looking at the shape of the cortical system tracts and losses in the fibers.
"The brain is normally very symmetric," Schneider said, as he noted that disruptions in tracts within three standard deviations are little cause for concern; however, four or five standard deviations is a red flag for traumatic brain injury.
Over the next 12-months, Schneider and colleagues will use HDFT scans on at least 50 young athletes within 7 days of experiencing a head injury to create a head injury database from which researchers can build a diagnostic range compared with normative data. "And then we can tell [based on our normative data] what's the likelihood of that [asymmetry] happening by chance? And where are the regions that those cables were connecting to?" Schneider said.
Schneider believes applying HDFT technology to sports injuries will prevent undesirable return-to-play for athletes with more subtle, harder to diagnose brain injuries, and, therefore, protect athletes from sustaining subsequent subconcussive insults.
"We know that multiple concussions can be dramatically more problematic than a single concussion ... . We want to be able to identify very small changes in the brain structure in terms of the anatomical tracts, and these techniques [let] us see unprecedented detail of the tract in that form to quantify the extent of loss of fibers within those tracts," Schneider said.
Looking forward, Schneider says the research goal is to refine HDFT in order to produce a routine circuit diagram of brain connectivity in 10 minutes, which will enable providers to better direct rehabilitation areas and targets for regrowing missing or damaged tissue.
At the Medical College of Wisconsin, Michael McCrea, PhD, will use grant funds to continue investigations into the course of time involved with physiological recovery after sport-related concussion (SRC).
"Answering this question has direct relevance to current strategies for injury management and return-to-play protocols after SRC, which are primarily based on a player's level of symptom recovery and other clinical tools, but not objective measurements of brain function," McCrea told MedPage Today.
"If we are able to detect these changes in blood flow, that will give us a better understanding of the mechanism of the symptoms, which will be useful in terms of monitoring recovery. Potentially, if we are able to detect these changes that will be useful in directing future treatments," McDonald told MedPage Today.
McDonald told MedPage Today that grant recipients have not been formerly required to share data from their research, but she expects some cross-pollination.
Other imaging-focused grant recipients include Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of California San Francisco, Sunnybrook Research Institute, and BrainScope Company.
The next round of GE-NFL grants will fund research and development of products and materials designed to prevent sports-related brain injuries.