Identifying Types of Traumatic Brain Injuries
Brain injuries affect every person differently. Separate areas of the brain suffer various types of injuries that manifest themselves in different ways. For example, a trauma that causes issues with the electrical signaling in the brain could lead to mild to severe seizures, depending on the severity of the injury. Other common types of severe brain injuries include anoxic, which is a lack of oxygen to the brain, or hypoxic, a limited amount of oxygen to the brain. These injuries show up differently in films than other injuries, such as a diffuse axonal injury (DAI), which may so up or may never show up on conventional MRI technology. In motor vehicle accidents, a lot of DAIs occur because, during that type of trauma, the brain tissue is twisted and stretched. Brain cells are long and narrow, like telephone wires. If telephone wires are twisted or put under too much stress, they will pop or become unusable. Therefore, for those types of DAIs, there are injuries over different areas of the brain, some of which are not large enough to be seen by standard MRI technology.
However, more advanced technology, such as DTI series onT3 MRIs, has advanced to the point that we can now see structural damage to entire tracks of those special cells helping the doctors confirm brain injury diagnosis in some cases. For instance, in an anoxic injury, a doctor may believe a person went through cardiac arrest or some other trauma that caused their oxygen to be completely cut off. More standard MRI and CT technology will show the process in a fairly predictable manner, with the brain deprived of oxygen on the margins at first, leading to the areas that typically get more blood involved. This changes how a lawyer proves the brain injury and how they would defend it. For instance, with a diffuse axonal injury, one lawyer may have a doctor say there is no visible evidence of damage due to lack of oxygen to the brain, while the other says that it is not visible because that is not the mechanism of injury in the case. If the injury is one from stretching and contorting the brain, you would not expect to see damage from lack of oxygen to the brain. The two are just different injuries. If a lawyer does not have experience working with these types of injuries, the lawyer may not realize that the insurance doctor may be telling the truth, but still misleading the judge or jury because you might not expect to see damage on the particular test for a particular type of brain injury.
