Measuring Cerebral Oxygenation in Healthy and Concussed Brain Using Frequency Domain Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fdNIRS)
Date
2018-06-14
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Abstract
Concussion or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a major public health concern that affects millions of people annually. The current metrics used to assess and diagnose concussion are largely subjective. There is a need for an objective neuroimaging tool to directly measure brain physiology and provide insight into recovery. Such a tool would supplement current subjective metrics used to monitor and index severity of injury. There is also a need to better understand the pathophysiology of concussion. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a non-invasive optical imaging tool used to measure aspects of microvascular hemoglobin oxygenation. In this study, we apply NIRS to quantify cerebral oxygenation (StO2), which has been used as an indicator of oxygen delivery to assess injury severity and tissue damage. We measured StO2 in a large cohort population with varying ages, and compared this to two post-concussive groups. In the first, a small varsity cohort, cerebral oxygenation was reduced in athletes who reported increased symptom severity. In the second, a pediatric sports-related concussion (SRC) cohort, cerebral oxygenation was increased when compared to age and gender matched controls. We also found that exercise is a potential confounding variable to consider when assessing concussion on the sideline, as we reported increases in StO2 in most varsity football players after practice. We report intriguing but not conclusive evidence that concussion can cause acute reduction in oxygenation, which may indicate changes in brain physiology immediately after injury. Overall, this thesis demonstrated that prefrontal cortex StO2, measured by NIRS, has the potential for monitoring brain physiology during concussion recovery in a clinical and sport setting.
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Dleikan, D. (2018). Measuring Cerebral Oxygenation in Healthy and Concussed Brain Using Frequency Domain Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fdNIRS) Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/32320