Brain vital signs

Brain vital signs is a scientific framework for translating complex brainwave data into a simple, practical, intuitive, and objective physiological marker of brain function. The framework was developed by neuroscientist and his team of researchers focused on the clinical translation of event-related brain potentials (ERP)s.
In contrast to conventional, lengthy and cumbersome ERP methods, brain vital signs extracts these physiological measurements in less than 10 minutes and is easily and fully deployable within a variety of sporting and clinical settings.
The initial brain vital signs framework measured three core, well-established ERP brain responses: the N100 for auditory sensation; the P300 for basic attention; and the N400 for cognitive processing. The amplitudes and latencies for all three responses are converted to standardized scores through normative transformation to produce a total of six brain vital signs measurements.
The foundational science behind brain vital signs began in the late 1990s and serves to improve the ability for healthcare experts to provide better diagnosis and treatments for injuries like concussions, brain injuries, and stroke along with diseases like , multiple sclerosis, and so many others.
Frontiers in Neuroscience Journal
In one of the most highly accessed, peer-reviewed study, "Developing Brain Vital Signs: Initial Framework for Monitoring Brain Function Changes Over Time," published in the Frontiers in Neuroscience, the authors explain that, like other vital signs of the body - such as blood pressure, heart rate and pulse oxygenation - the development of brain vital signs represents an essential advance to monitor brain health. Specifically, the authors highlighted:
* The critical need for a rapid, objective and physiological index of brain function, which builds from more than 70 years of fundamental science in event-related potentials (ERPs), a well-established evaluation of brain waves to measure specific brain functions.
* The framework to translate this complex science into a user-friendly and highly meaningful index of an individual’s healthy brain function, to address concerns of injury (like concussion) or disease (like dementia).
* The evaluation of brain vital signs across the life span, and showed subtle age-related changes that were not detected by existing standard clinical tests that use subjective behavioural measures.
The study ranked in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric, with one of the highest-scoring outputs from this source (#1 of 4,396) and has more views than 96% of all Frontiers articles.
In Vice's Motherboard, explains "that all doctors should be monitoring brain waves, alongside more standard clinical vital signs of patients, healthy and otherwise, via electroencephalogram, or EEG, which monitors electrical activity of the brain."
In SFU News, states "the brain vital-sign framework described in Frontiers in Neuroscience represents the first step towards an easy way to monitor brain health...Potential applications are in concussion, brain injury, stroke, dementia and other devastating brain diseases and disorders."
In the same SFU News) —which Ghosh Hajra says is a testament to the urgent need to quantify brain vitality."
Brain: A Journal of Neurology
' published results from a multi-year hockey concussion study with the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center, which used the brain vital signs framework to track the brain function of young Junior A male ice hockey players.
The research team monitored and tracked 47 Tier III, Junior A, male ice hockey players over two seasons, and divided the players into two groups: 1) players who were diagnosed with concussions and 2) players who were not. They used brain vital signs to conduct assessments at baseline, post-injury, return-to-play, and post-season time points.
The authors reported three key results:
# Brain vital signs detected significant neurophysiological impairments following concussions;
# Brain vital signs detected residual impairments in attention response amplitudes when concussed players were cleared to return to play using the best available clinical testing protocols; and,
# The research team also found significant delays in cognitive processing for players whom were not diagnosed with concussions at any time during the season (suggesting sub-concussive effects).
, the study's senior author, explains in a Vancouver Sun article, "we felt that what was needed was an objective measure of the brain’s vital signs, like we look at blood pressure or heart rate."
He further explains in Medscape Medical News that "the brain vital signs method is more sensitive to the subtle impacts of concussion and can detect physiological impairments that the current concussion protocols cannot."
In The Hockey News article titled "A new brain study could revolutionize concussion protocol. How?", the study's lead author Shaun Fickling explains that brain vital signs "look at how the brain responds to the pattern changes embedded within that auditory stimulant...The healthy brain responds in a very characteristic way. The impaired brain or the concussed brain doesn’t quite respond to pattern changes in the same way, and that affect is measurable, and that is how we put that together into the brain vital signs’ framework."
Global News reported that "their research may impact the way concussions are treated in the future."
Other recent studies on brain vital signs:
* Smith, A. M., Alford, P. A., Aubry, M., Benson, B., Black, A., Brooks, A., ... Stuart, M. J. (2019). Proceedings from the Ice Hockey Summit III: Action on Concussion. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 18(1), 23-34.
* Pawlowski GM, Ghosh-Hajra S, Fickling SD, Liu CC, Song X, Robinovitch S, Doesburg SM and D'Arcy RCN (2019) Brain Vital Signs: Expanding From the Auditory to Visual Modality. Front. Neurosci. 12:968. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.00968
* Ghosh Hajra*, S., Liu*, C.C., Song, X., Fickling*, S.D., Cheung, T.P.L. & D’Arcy, R.C.N. (2018). Accessing knowledge of the 'here and now': Initial evidence of N400-like electromagnetic responses in orientation processing. Journal of Neural Engineering. In press.
* Ghosh Hajra, S. et al. (2018). Multimodal characterization of the semantic N400 response within a rapid evaluation brain vital sign framework. Journal of Translational Medicine, 16:151.
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