Medical Imaging to Recharacterize Concussion for Improved Diagnosis in Asymptomatic Athletes

The Purdue Neurotrauma Group began in 2009 to study causes and consequences of concussion in youth athletes in an effort to understand why, in a two-player collision that produced a diagnosed injury, it was only one— rather than each—athlete that evidenced symptoms. Our work applies the concept of structural health monitoring (Bond et al. 2014; Kim et al. 2014), without intervention, to characterize how the brain becomes predisposed to presentation of symptoms after exposure to head acceleration events (direct collisions or whiplash movements associated with contact to other portions of the body).