Predicting motor and cognitive outcomes from MRIs of brain structure in children with acquired brain injury: A pilot study

Background: Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) describes a range of brain injuries occurring after birth, including tumor, traumatic brain injury or stroke. Although MRIs are routinely used for diagnosis, prediction of outcome following brain injury is challenging. Quantitative structural information from brain images may provide an opportunity to predict patient outcomes; however, due to the high prevalence of severe pathology in children with ABI, quantitative approaches must be robust to injury severity. Methods: In this pilot cross-sectional study, automated quantitative measures were extracted from the MRIs of a cohort of children with ABI (n = 30, 8–16 years, follow up MRI taken 1.8–13.4 years after time of injury) as well as 36 typically developing controls with no brain injury (7–17 years) using a pathology-robust technique. Measures of brain volume, lesion volume and cortical morphology were associated with concurrent motor, behavioral, visual and communicative function using Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression. Results: These regression models were validated on a separate test set (n = 8 of the ABI cohort), which revealed significant correlations between measures of brain structure with motor, cognitive, visual and communicative function (r = 0.65–0.85, all p