White matter changes in patients with mild traumatic brain injury: MRI perspective

Abstract

This review focuses on white matter (WM) changes in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) as assessed by multimodal MRI. All the peer reviewed publications on WM changes in mTBI from January 2011 through September 2016 are included in this review. This review is organized as follows: introduction to mTBI, the basics of multimodal MRI techniques that are potentially useful for probing the WM integrity, summary and critical evaluation of the published literature on the application of multimodal MRI techniques to assess the changes of WM in mTBI, and correlation of MRI measures with behavioral deficits. The MRI–pathology correlation studies based on preclinical models of mTBI are also reviewed. Finally, the author's perspective of future research directions is described.