Advances in Traumatic Brain Injury Diagnosis

Dear Colleagues,

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains a major cause of death and disability worldwide. Standard indications for diagnosis include external force trauma to the head causing, at minimum, alteration of consciousness resulting from coup-contrecoup, rotational/inertia, and blast-type injuries. TBI can present with heterogeneous and/or evolving signs and symptoms that range from mild complaints to focal neurologic deficit, obtundation, coma, and death. Barriers to accurate and timely TBI diagnosis are related to its multiple diagnostic components: known vs. unknown events of external trauma, presence of symptoms without structural signs of injury (e.g., concussion without findings on the brain CT scan), concurrent systemic injuries, metabolic processes, medications and/or substances that confound the level of consciousness, lack of readily available resources or technologies to detect injury (e.g., neurocritical care and/or concussion specialists, CT scanner), and variable community awareness and/or understanding of whether TBI has occurred and when to seek care. The Glasgow Coma Scale has withstood the test of time in providing objective criteria for rapid neurologic assessment and TBI severity classification. Modern advancements have enabled the investigation and qualification of blood-based biomarkers, advanced neuroimaging sequences, assessment tools for cognitive, balance, and attentional deficits, and emerging wearable technologies with utility in the field or clinic. For more severe injuries, updated classification schemes, diagnostic tools (e.g., detection of cerebral activity for comatose patients, multimodal intracranial monitoring, cerebrospinal fluid sampling), and prognostic measures have been developed.

This Special Issue seeks and welcomes modern original investigations of objective tools, measures, and technologies that enable the expedient, specific, and accurate diagnosis of TBI across the spectrum of injury severity from concussion to coma. High-quality review articles may be considered if novel, practical solutions and/or implementation strategies are concurrently presented.

Dr. Hansen Deng
Dr. John K. Yue
Guest Editors

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• biomarker
• clinical trial
• concussion
• diagnosis
• injury severity
• neuroimaging
• neurologic examination
• structural injury
• technology
• traumatic brain injury