Development of brain atlases for early-to-middle adolescent collision-sport athletes

Abstract

Human brains develop across the life span and largely vary in morphology. Adolescent collision-sport athletes undergo repetitive head impacts over years of practices and competitions, and therefore may exhibit a neuroanatomical trajectory different from healthy adolescents in general. However, an unbiased brain atlas targeting these individuals does not exist. Although standardized brain atlases facilitate spatial normalization and voxel-wise analysis at the group level, when the underlying neuroanatomy does not represent the study population, greater biases and errors can be introduced during spatial normalization, confounding subsequent voxel-wise analysis and statistical findings. In this work, targeting early-to-middle adolescent (EMA, ages 13–19) collision-sport athletes, we developed population-specific brain atlases that include templates (T1-weighted and diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging) and semantic labels (cortical and white matter parcellations). Compared to standardized adult or age-appropriate templates, our templates better characterized the neuroanatomy of the EMA collision-sport athletes, reduced biases introduced during spatial normalization, and exhibited higher sensitivity in diffusion tensor imaging analysis. In summary, these results suggest the population-specific brain atlases are more appropriate towards reproducible and meaningful statistical results, which better clarify mechanisms of traumatic brain injury and monitor brain health for EMA collision-sport athletes.

A Novel Experimental Approach for the Measurement of Vibration-Induced Changes in the Rheological Properties of Ex Vivo Ovine Brain Tissue

“…Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are prolific amongst high-impact-sports players, with some collegiate football players amassing over 1000 head injuries in a season [1]. Reports of depressive, anxious, and aggressive behaviours and cognitive delays have emerged from people with increased subjection to repeated TBIs, including high impact sports players, military personnel, and sufferers of physical abuse [2][3][4][5]. Despite regular subjection to TBIs, understanding of the neurological effects of repeated head trauma and importance of return to play legislation in sports is lacking [6].…”