title: Reaction time impairments in decision-making networks as a diagnostic marker for traumatic brain injuries and neurological diseases.
abstract: The presence of diffuse Focal Axonal Swellings (FAS) is a hallmark cellular feature in many neurological diseases and traumatic brain injury. Among other things, the FAS have a significant impact on spike-train encodings that propagate through the affected neurons, leading to compromised signal processing on a neuronal network level. This work merges, for the first time, three fields of study: (i) signal processing in excitatory-inhibitory (EI) networks of neurons via population codes, (ii) decision-making theory driven by the production of evidence from stimulus, and (iii) compromised spike-train propagation through FAS. As such, we demonstrate a mathematical architecture capable of characterizing compromised decision-making driven by cellular mechanisms. The computational model also leads to several novel predictions and diagnostics for understanding injury level and cognitive deficits, including a key finding that decision-making reaction times, rather than accuracy, are indicative of network level damage. The results have a number of translational implications, including that the level of network damage can be characterized by the reaction times in simple cognitive and motor tests.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195-3925, USA. pedro.doria.maia@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Pedro D
authors.initials: PD
authors.lastname: Maia
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195-3925, USA.
authors.forename: J Nathan
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Kutz
mesh_terms: D001930:Brain Injuries; D000070642:Brain Injuries, Traumatic / Q000175:diagnosis*; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009474:Neurons; D011930:Reaction Time
keywords: Alzheimer; Cognitive deficits; Decision making; Focal Axonal Swellings; Multiple sclerosis; Neural networks; Neurological diseases; Parkinson; Traumatic brain injury