Designing a normative neuroimaging library to support diagnosis of traumatic brain injury

With recent advances in neuroimaging, moving from qualitative to quantitative outputs, an understanding is needed of what normal data look like to be able to apply these advances to diagnosis and outcomes prediction in traumatic brain injury (TBI).

An article in the Journal of Neurotrauma introduces the large Normative Neuroimaging Library (NLL) to the research community.

The American College of Radiology and Cohen Veterans Bioscience created a reference database of healthy individuals with neuroimaging, demographic data, and characterization of psychologic functioning and neurocognitive data. NNL consists of data collected from about 1,900 healthy participants across a diverse population.

“On its release, NNL is poised to support the use of advanced imaging in clinician decision support tools, the validation of imaging biomarkers, and the investigation of brain-behavior anomalies, moving the field toward precision medicine,” stated Allyson Gage, Chief Medical Officer at Cohen Veterans Bioscience, and co-authors.

“My congratulations to Dr. Gage and colleagues for this important effort. I predict that this normative neuroimaging library will serve as a cornerstone for many important future investigations in TBI as well as a wide variety of other conditions. Visionary forward-looking work,” says David L. Brody, MD, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Neurotrauma.