New York Times
If a ll goes according to Dennis Molfese's plan, the day is coming when a football player who tales a hit to the head will go to the sideline, tale off his helmet and slip on an electrode-covered mesh cap.
The team's medical staff will analyze the player's brain waves and determine within minutes whether he can safely return to the game or whether he has sustained a concussion, and if s, how severe.
Putting the finishing touches on that device is among the projects planned in the University of Nebraska's Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior, which opens this month in Memorial Stadium's expanded east side.
CB3, as it is called, it housed in the same &55 million structure that holds 28 luxury suites and an additional 6,000 seats for the football stadium, The center is one of a number of university-affiliated research center across the nation looking for better ways to diagnose and treat traumatic head injuries and make football and other spots safer.
"There has been great concussion research that's been going on for decades," said Molfese, the CB3 director. "It's disconcerting to realize just how little we really know."
Tom Osborne, Nebraska's retired football coach and athletic director, said CB3 and the adjoining Athletic Performance Lab fit his vision for what he wanted to include in the stadium expansion. The project was one of Osborne's major initiatives in his five years as the athletic director. Osborne envisioned a collaboration of the athletic and academic sides of the university. So while athletes participate in concussion studies, political science researchers might use CB3's brain-scanning technology to see if they can figure out why some people lean conservative and others liberal.
Concussions have become one of the top concerns in sports in recent years after prominent brain injuries and disease in former N.F.L. players, driven in part by some high-profile suicides. Thousands of former players are suing the league, saying that for years the N.F.L. did not do enough to protect players from concussions. The N.C.A.A is also addressing the issue.
"There are a lot of things that are very important with the N.C.A. as far as the health and safety of the students-athlete," the N.C.A.A. chief medical officer, Brain Hainline said, " and concussion is wright up there as first and foremost. It's the elephant on the table, and we, with everyone else, we have to solve it."
There are about 300, 000 sports-related concussions reported in the United States annually, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been funneled into research, with much of the money going to universities.
Nebraska recruited Molfese, 67, away from the University of Luisville, giving him virtual carte blanche in the design and equipping of CB3.
Molfese is among 14 experts serving on the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Committee on Sports-Related Concussions in Youth, which will report to Congress and President Obama on brain injuries in children and young adults. He also heads a Big Ten-Ivy League partnership studying brain injuries in sports.
Nebraska's brain center is connected by a 100-foot skywalk to the new Athletic Performance lab, which will research, among other things, injury prevention and high-tech ways to maximize performance of athletes. CB3 and the performance lab will partner on some projects.
CB3's top attraction is a type of magnetic resonance imaging machine that tracks the brain's blood flow. It is hoped that the $3 million scanner will help to better define what is a concussion.
"There's no question its's going to move the dial forward," Heinline said. "The big, hoped- for dream would be, let's have a biomarker in brain imaging. If you're to the left of that, you're safe; if you're to the tight of it, you're not. That's probably a few years out. But functional brain imaging and blood flow are going to very important of that. "
"There's no question its's going to move the dial forward," Heinline said. "The big, hoped- for dream would be, let's have a biomarker in brain imaging. If you're to the left of that, you're safe; if you're to the tight of it, you're not. That's probably a few years out. But functional brain imaging and blood flow are going to very important of that. "
The M.R.I. machine also can be used on game days to assess injuries of all kinds.
Molfese said the sideline concussion assessment tool would be the first of what he hopes are many groundbreaking developments to come out of CB3. The device would allow medical personnel to go beyond the standard practice of asking the injured athlete questions and judge, based on his or her answers, whether it is safe for him or her to return to a game.
If a linebacker took a hit to the head, he would come to the sideline, and an electrode net would be placed over his head. Battery- powered brain recording equipment would measure the player's responses to stimuli.
"We can get an idea of what area of the brain is being involved in the process, whether the speed of processing is at the rate it should be," Molfese said. "The different areas of the brain that normally integrate information that normally integrate information quickly stop doing that, so that's another way we should be able to pick up whether there is an injury or not.
Concussion is one of the measure topics in the neurosciences nowadays since concussion causes not only acute symptoms but also chronic cognitive dysfunctions that are different from degenerative disease such as Alzheimer's disease. BU also has launched the brain center to study the impact of sports-related concussions in the brain. The idea of making the academic side and sports side related will produce huge progresses.
BTW, it's such a cute expression "elephant on the table". I still don't get it, but something like "目の上のたんこぶ”? , I guess.
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