The pathology of traumatic brain injury in experimental models includes acute inflammatory reaction, blood brain barrier disruption, hemorrhage, demyelination, axonal transection and chronically with axonal neuronal loss and gliosis. Stem cell (SC) therapy is a potential treatment either as replacement therapy or via paracrine effect with release of growth factors and anti-inflammatory cytokines for TBI injury. We reported on a longitudinal study in a mild TBI rat model based on MRI and correlated to histology over 2 months. We reported that diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) axial diffusivity and fractional anisotropy (FA) were sensitive to axonal integrity, whereas radial diffusivity showed significant correlation to the myelin compactness. We also observed that FA was correlated with astrogliosis in the gray matter, whereas mean diffusivity was correlated with increased cellularity and magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) demonstrated a strong correlation with both axon and myelin integrity. We also were able to demonstrate that in rats with mild ventriculomegaly (MVM) demonstrated insignificant changes in FA, suggesting less axonal injury compared to normal rats following mild TBI. The MVM animals had significant increase in MTR compared to normal rats following mild TBI. On histological examination, limited axonal injury with significant increase of microgliosis and astrogliosis in MVM brains compared with normal animals. MVM rats exhibited greater inflammation following TBI compared to normal rat brains. These results indicated the importance of using MRI to screen for brain abnormalities in experimental animals used in TBI studies and that the variation observed in TBI studies may be due to the variability in response to induced trauma as a result of structural morphology The relationship between changes in diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and magnetization transfer imaging (MTI) and the underlying pathologies is still relatively unknown.We investigated the radiological-pathological correlation between these imaging techniques and immunohistochemistry using a closed head rat model of TBI. TBI was performed on female rats followed longitudinally by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) out to 30 days postinjury, with a subset of animals selected for histopathological analyses. A MRI-based finite element analysis was generated to characterize the pattern of the mechanical insult and estimate the extent of brain injury to direct the pathological correlation with imaging findings. We observed that DTI axial diffusivity and fractional anisotropy (FA) were sensitive to axonal integrity, whereas radial diffusivity showed significant correlation to the myelin compactness. FA was correlated with astrogliosis in the gray matter, whereas mean diffusivity was correlated with increased cellularity. Secondary inflammatory responses also partly affected the changes of these DTI metrics. The magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) at 3.5ppm demonstrated a strong correlation with both axon and myelin integrity. Decrease in MTR at 20ppm correlated with the extent of astrogliosis in both gray and white matter. Conventional T2-weighted MRI did not detect abnormalities following TBI, DTI and MTI afforded complementary insight into the underlying pathologies reflecting varying injury states over time, and thus may substitute for histology to reveal diffusive axonal injury pathologies in vivo.
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