Testing breakthrough for mild TBI

[unhappycamper]

Testing breakthrough for mild TBI
By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Feb 22, 2008 14:49:54 EST

After months of military officials and medical personnel lamenting the lack of an immediate, unequivocal, physical proof of mild traumatic brain injury, an anesthesiologist thinks he has found a solution.

And it may be as simple as two sensors and a BlackBerry.

Dr. Richard Dutton heads up trauma anesthesiology at the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland and sees about 4,000 people a year who doctors believe have a brain injury. But without a CT scan or an MRI, it’s hard to immediately tell for sure — especially if, as is the case in most trauma situations, doctors are also worried about broken bones, ruptured organs or heavy bleeding. And about 3,000 of those cases are mild TBI, which doesn’t show up on a scan.

So Dutton and a team of engineers decided to see if they could use sonar to “listen” for differences in healthy brains and injured brains. They used a headband with sensors to pick up the sound transmitted through the brain with sonar and then analyzed the data fed back into a computer. The Air Force paid for the research.

“We’d ‘ping’ them with sonar and then listen,” Dutton said Feb. 20 at an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering conference.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/02/military_220208_braintrauma_w/