Yu-Chien Wu, MD, PhD, is an active co-investigator in a nationwide sport-related concussion consortium called CARE (Concussion Assessment, Research and Education Consortium). The CARE consortium implemented the largest prospective study on the natural history of sports-related concussions. In addition to her administrative responsibilities in the consortium (more details in the B. Collaboration section below), the Wu Lab conducts research using the CARE neuroimaging, clinical and blood biomarker data. Despite negative findings in routine clinical T1- and T2-weighted MRI examinations (per the definition of "mild" brain injury), our lab's recent studies have demonstrated that diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) exhibited significant sensitivities to acute sports-related concussion (Mustafi et al., J Neurotrauma 2018). Longitudinally, the alternations in DTI metrics were also associated with and predictive of clinical outcome measures, recovery time (Wu et al., Neurology 2020, with editorial commentary), and blood biomarkers (Wu et al., Neurology 2023, with a major revision). The anatomical location of brain injury following a concussion may be highly heterogeneous. Because of the variations across concussed athletes, subtle changes may be buried in noise and undetectable in standard groupwise neuroimaging analyses. To address this, the Wu Lab has obtained an R01 award (NS112303, 2020–2025) for developing subject-specific analysis approaches. We have presented pilot results at conferences (Elsaid et al., ISMRM 2018; Yang et al., MHSRS 2022; Yang et al., ISMRM 2023), and a manuscript is under preparation.
