AUT aims to tackle hidden concussions with Artificial Intelligence

The Auckland University of Technology (AUT) is experimenting with pairing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with MRI scanners to help detect brain injuries that are undetected by the human eye.

AUT neuroscience professor Mangor Pedersen and his PhD students are wanting to develop algorithms to be able to identify and diagnose the gravity of swelling in the brain.

Incorporating AI with MRI’s will assist in identifying the severity of concussions and predicting the recovery time frame of rugby players with head injuries, says Pedersen.

“To make automated predictions and then we can tell a player, and this is how severe your injury is, this is how long you're likely take to recover, and those things compared to now when you rely on people's own reports and symptoms, symptom descriptions and so forth, which can be challenging in many ways.”

AI has evolved to a point where it can process and analyse images to find anomalies.

Pedersen says that because of AI he is hoping to be working on being able distinguish a scale of the severity of brain injuries, how they differentiate from each other and whether a player has a concussion or not.

“So long as we can train the algorithm to find subtle features that might differentiate brains with a brain injury versus a non-brain injury brain.

“We can see which category that you fall in, do you fall in this category that has a prognosis in this manner and you’re going to recover in one month and so forth.”

Alice Theadom, the Director of the Traumatic Brain Injury Network says that in New Zealand there needs to be a shift in awareness and response to brain injuries.

“I think terms such as ‘head knock’ often kind of minimise the impact or the impact it might have on someone.

“And it's used very loosely.

“It's not a clinical term, as I say, and I think, we need to be careful about the language that we use.

“We should be talking about these injuries which can have quite significant injury impacts for some people.”

Pedersen agrees, saying that the belief in rugby is that if you call it a head knock, you can play on no matter the severity.

“It’s probably a culture change more than a sport change in many ways as well, just to get that understanding.

“We want to change how we think about the brain because you wouldn’t run into a wall voluntarily.”

Both Pedersen and Theadom believe that the evolution of AI and MRI's will help provide physical proof of concussions and reveal to athletes the seriousness of hidden brain injuries.