A Novel Histological Technique to Assess Severity of Traumatic Brain Injury in Rodents: Comparisons to Neuroimaging and Neurological Outcomes

Dmitry Frank; Benjamin F Gruenbaum; Ilan Shelef; Vladislav Zvenigorodsky; Yair Benjamin; Olha Shapoval; Ron Gal; Alexander Zlotnik; Israel Melamed; Matthew Boyko

doi:10.3389/fnins.2021.733115

A Novel Histological Technique to Assess Severity of Traumatic Brain Injury in Rodents: Comparisons to Neuroimaging and Neurological Outcomes

Front Neurosci. 2021 Oct 13:15:733115. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2021.733115. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Soroka University Medical Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
² Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, United States.
³ Department of Radiology, Soroka University Medical Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
⁴ Department of Physiology, Faculty of Biology, Ecology and Medicine, Dnepropetrovsk State University, Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.
⁵ Department of Neurosurgery, Soroka University Medical Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.

Abstract

Here we evaluate an alternative protocol to histologically examine blood-brain barrier (BBB) breakdown, brain edema, and lesion volume following traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the same set of rodent brain samples. We further compare this novel histological technique to measurements determined by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a neurological severity score (NSS). Sixty-six rats were randomly assigned to a sham-operated, mild TBI, moderate TBI, or severe TBI group. 48 h after TBI, NSS, MRI and histological techniques were performed to measure TBI severity outcome. Both the histological and MRI techniques were able to detect measurements of severity outcome, but histologically determined outcomes were more sensitive. The two most sensitive techniques for determining the degree of injury following TBI were NSS and histologically determined BBB breakdown. Our results demonstrate that BBB breakdown, brain edema, and lesion volume following TBI can be accurately measured by histological evaluation of the same set of brain samples.

Keywords: histology; magnetic imaging resonance; methods; rodent; traumatic brain injury.