Abstract
Neuroelectric measures derived from human magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings hold promise as aides to diagnosis and treatment monitoring and targeting for chronic sequelae of traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study tests novel MEG-derived regional brain measures of tonic neuroelectric activation for long-term test-retest reliability and sensitivity to symptoms. Resting state MEG recordings were obtained from a normative cohort (CamCAN, baseline: n = 613; mean 16-month follow-up: n = 245) and a chronic symptomatic TBI cohort (TEAM-TBI, baseline: n = 62; mean 6-month follow-up: n = 40). The MEG-derived neuroelectric measures were corrected for the empty-room contribution using a random forest classifier. The mean 16-month correlation between baseline and 16-month follow-up CamCAN measures was 0.67; test-retest reliability was markedly improved in this study compared with previous work. The TEAM-TBI cohort was screened for depression, somatization, and anxiety with the Brief Symptom Inventory and for insomnia with the Insomnia Severity Index and was assessed via adjudication for six clinical syndromes: chronic pain, psychological health, and oculomotor, vestibular, cognitive, and sleep dysfunction. Linear classifiers constructed from the 136 regional measures from each TEAM-TBI cohort member distinguished those with and without each symptom, p < 0.0003 for each, i.e., the tonic regional neuroelectric measures of activation are sensitive to the presence/absence of these symptoms and clinical syndromes. The novel regional MEG-derived neuroelectric measures obtained and tested in this study demonstrate the necessary and sufficient properties to be clinically useful, i.e., good test-retest reliability, sensitivity to symptoms in each individual, and obtainable using automatic processing without human judgement or intervention.
Highlights
The results reported here enable rejection of the following null hypotheses. (a) Individuals with and without symptoms are indistinguishable. (b) The cohort membership of each individual (TEAM-traumatic brain injury (TBI) or Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (CamCAN)) cannot be determined. (c) Regional measures from an individual do not reliably repeat
Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings were processed from each subject of two cohorts: (1) the normative CamCAN cohort, n = 621 at baseline, ages 18–87 [13,14], n = 259 at follow-up, and (2) the chronically symptomatic concussed TEAM-TBI cohort, n = 63 at baseline, ages 21–60, n = 40 at follow-up
For the normative CamCAN cohort, the mean and standard deviation baseline values for each region are shown in Appendix A Table A1
Summary
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common cause of disability and death. Localized neuroelectric correlates of persistent functional sequelae after TBI would provide significant clinical value for diagnosis, targeted therapy, disease monitoring. For more than a century It has been the expectation that neuronal electric activity is the key to understanding the brain function. Human behavior is thought to depend on cooperative activity of large neural populations. Clinical neurophysiologists routinely measure single neurons to aide implantation of therapeutic devices deep in the brain [1]
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