Analysis Of DTI Sequences Of Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness

With the progress of intensive care unit and first-aid,more and more patients with severe brain injury can survive.This type of patients after a long period of coma,the level of consciousness will have different degrees of damage.Some patients will become disorders of consciousness(DOC),which consist of minimally conscious state(MCS)and unresponsive wakefulness syndrome(UWS).It is difficult to distinguish between MCS and UWS in the early clinical,but patients with different pronostic.The MCS patients can be treated with basic recovery of consciousness,and there is a greater value of treatment;but UWS patients were less likely to recovery,with less treatment value.At present,behavior scale always be used to assess patients level of consciousness.Due to the complexity of assess work,the method of behavior scale not only means a high misdiagnosis but also strongly affected by the subjective factors.With the development of magnetic resonance technology,especially the appearance of diffusion tensor imaging technology(DTI),people began to study the prognosis of patients with consciousness disorder from the microstructure of the white matter of the brain.The DTI sequences and CRS-R scores of 39 patients with severe disorders of consciousness(including 14 MCS and 25 UWS patients)were collected,in this paper.The DTI parameters fractional anisotropy(FA)and mean diffusivity(MD)about cerebral cortex,thalamus,brainstem three interested area was calculated by TBSS-ROI(Tract-Based Spatial Statistics)analysis method.T test analysis was performed to compare the differences in FA value and MD value among different groups.Spearman correlation analysis was performed to assess the correlation of FA,MD and CRS-R score.Support vector machine algorithm was also used to do classified research with DOC patients.DTI parameters,DTI parameters and age,DTI parameters and gender,and DTI parameters,gender and age was used for the input features to do the classified research.The experimental results show that the patient's sex and age as the classification features can effectively improve the classification accuracy,sensitivity and specificity.Finally the confidence of the classification results was used as the level of awareness and prognosis of patients,known as DTI-Score.It can not only can reflect the patient category but also provide the credibility of the diagnosis results(provide more medical treatment for the patients with low credibility of the diagnosis results).Using DTI-Score to assess patients outcome not only avoid the effect of subjective factors,but also can provide clinical decision for the patients' family and doctors.