Completed and Foundational Concussion Research Projects

Early research helped position the Minds Matter Concussion Program to become a Frontier Program at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia with a diverse research portfolio.

Key Completed and Foundational Research Projects

Quantitative Assessments for Sports-Related Concussion

This five-year project integrated neuroscience, bioengineering and clinical protocols involving instrumenting athletes on the field, using animal models in the laboratory and in-depth clinical observation of patients with concussion with a goal to develop a suite of quantitative assessment tools to enhance accuracy of sports-related concussion diagnoses, with a focus on objective metrics of activity, balance, neurosensory processing including eye tracking, as well as measures of cerebral blood flow. This project is examined sex-specific data to see how prevention and diagnosis strategies need to be tailored differently for males and females. Significant lines of research have grown from what we learned and are ongoing lines of inquiry described in Visio-Vestibular Exam.

Integrative Science to Advance Pediatric Concussion Diagnosis and Treatment

This project aimed to increase our knowledge of the neurological health effects of repeated head impacts for middle school and high school-age youth involved in sports through the use of head impact sensors and a diverse suite of neurofunctional assessments, develop an objective biofluid biomarker to identify the functional deficits associated with youth concussion, advance our basic science understanding of the electrophysiology of concussion and, lastly, examine changes in neural brain activity using novel methods of magnetoencephalography (MEG). With funding from Pennsylvania Department of Health, this project spurred important advances in the use of head impact sensors high caliber concussion research. Read more about that research here.

Minds Matter: Concussion Care at CHOP

A Chair’s Initiative –- This program, funded by the Department of Pediatrics Chair's Initiative at CHOP and led by Kristy Arbogast, PhD, Christina L. Master, MD, and Matthew Grady, MD, was a two-year initiative to develop and refine a state-of-the-science standardized pediatric concussion management program across all CHOP departments that diagnose triage and treat concussion. These include primary care, sports medicine, emergency medicine, neurology, trauma and afterhours triage call center. Impact evaluation was conducted leveraging CHOP’s EHR and provider surveys.

Concussion Registry Development

The initial objective of this concussion research, led by Kristy Arbogast, PhD and funded by a Children's of Hospital Research Institute Clinical and Translational Research Award, was to test the feasibility of creating a comprehensive registry of patients 5-21 years old diagnosed with concussion within the CHOP Care Network. Data capture how concussions are assessed, diagnosed, and treated.

Tasks involved a review of current data fields in CHOP’s electronic health records for capturing subject concussion information, as well as data collection from patients presenting for new concussion evaluation. Patients were recruited from CHOP specialty care outpatient clinics, including sports medicine and orthopedics. By capturing a standardized and comprehensive data set on every child with concussion, the Minds Matter Concussion Program team is forming a valuable resource that can be utilized to answer other important questions about prevention, diagnosis and management of this common injury.