Abstract
The objective of this work is to characterize the neurophysiologic changes in a patient who suffered a concussion during a football practice via quantitative and graph-theoretic measures and to evaluate the results with respect to the pre-concussion state. We report on a high school athlete who sustained a self-reported concussion while wearing a 16-channel portable EEG recorder and a specially instrumented helmet capable of recording biomechanical impact data. This opportune occurrence has enabled a detailed assessment of the type and duration of changes that occur to human brain function immediately following a sports-related concussion. In the post-concussion EEG segment, we observed a significant decrease in both the quantitative and graph-theoretic measures. More specifically, we observed a significant decline in the cross-mutual information measure between certain pairs of electrodes as well as in the global efficiency of the corresponding brain network. The deviations in the selected quantitative and graph-theoretic measures partially corroborate the usual clinical characteristics of the post-concussion state but further investigation for additional data and evaluation of alternative quantitative measures are needed. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.