Neuroimaging Update on Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury is a common injury worldwide that affects individuals of all ages. Injuries can range in severity. Timely assessment of injury is important to triage cases that may be severe and imminently life-threatening, and neuroimaging is a critical component to the clinical care of such patients. Injuries may occur in multiple spaces from the extracranial soft tissues to the potential spaces between meningeal layers to the brain parenchyma itself. The neck and intracranial arterial and venous vessels can also be injured with devastating sequelae. CT, CTA, MRI, and MRA can all be useful in the assessment of head injury. In particular, CT is often used as a first-line imaging modality to screen for acute intracranial injury. MRI can be useful in patients who have discordance between symptoms and CT findings as well as in those with more prolonged symptoms or who suffer chronic sequelae of injury. Neuroimaging research is ongoing using MRI to study the underlying pathophysiology of head injury.