Mission

Our Mission is twofold:
1) Discover and generate new knowledge about the mechanisms of brain injury and develop novel treatments to improve brain recovery.
2) Exert an important influence on raising the standards of care for our wounded servicemen and women, veterans, and society at large.

The Brain Imaging and Recovery Laboratory is a part of the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System (CTVHCS). Our mission is part of the overall Department of Veterans Affairs mission to “care for him who shall have borne the battle."

Background

Improved diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injury (TBI) are needed for our soldiers, veterans, their families, and society at large. Estimates suggest more than 20,000 servicemen and women have sustained brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts 75,000-150,000 victims of TBI may result by the end of the current conflicts. The majority suffer from mild TBI, a form commonly undetected, misdiagnosed, or dismissed. The diagnosis of mild TBI from blast injuries is difficult because the underlying pathology is not well-understood, and lesions may be subtle, scattered, varied, and resultant cognitive-behavioral presentations are non-uniform and non-specific.

The Laboratory

This initiative, funded by the CTVHCS, is designed to identify neuroimaging features that account for cognitive impairments in TBI and serve as a testing ground to evaluate innovative and promising new treatments for TBI. Our objectives are to employ a unique multimodal approach to:
  1) relate microanatomic, neurochemical, and neurophysiological abnormalities to cognitive disturbances and
  2) examine the efficacy of novel cognitive training programs and other treatments for TBI and study parallel underlying neural mechanisms.

Our Methods

Our imaging is carried out on a powerful 3.0 Tesla GE Scanner. Using this scanner, we are utilizing 4 different types of images. When combined, these images will help give us a fuller view of the brain's health.

Functional MR Imaging:
provides the ability to measure brain function in real time by tracking blood flow to active regions. This information is superimposed on a structural picture of the brain.

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy:
helps detect the type of brain abnormality by measuring chemical profiles in the brain.

Diffusion Tensor Imaging:
measures the direction of movement of water molecules in the brain. This provides the ability to detect microscopic abnormalities in the connections between brain cells (the neural network).

Image courtesy of Dr. Ponnada Narayana

Cognitive Assessments give careful, quantitative measures of concentration, memory, and other cognitive skills important in everyday life that are correlated with the above brain imaging results.