A New Hyperspectral Image Capture Tool for Evaluating TBI

Traumatic Brain Injury accounts for 1525% of all combat casualties and on today"s battlefield, 30-40% of all injuries have a head injury component. The implication of TBI related injuries on the fighting force is that unit readiness is slowed as a result of diminished soldier reaction time and behavioral issues that may reduce the soldier"s responsiveness. Current methods of TBI diagnosis vary from low-tech physical examinations that scale the extent of injury based on motor skills, verbal response, and eye opening, to high tech CT scans, brain MRI"s and EEG"s. These tools can provide valuable information regarding the assessment of a patients TBI yet they lack the capability to precisely define and quantify the actual intensity of the injury sustained, especially in the case of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). This proposal concerns the development of a new method for evaluating TBI based on self administered non-invasive imaging of the retina [2, 7-9]. The approach is aligned with the growing consensus within the TBI community that it may be possible to correlate TBI with eye injury sequelae. If successfully developed, the proposed method is expected to provide the US military with a new TBI diagnostic capability for combat deployment.