IC‐P‐093: Deformation Based Morphometry Study of Retired CFL Football Players
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Repeated concussions in former athletes of contact sports have been associated with cognitive deficits and abnormalities on MRI. We aimed to study structural changes associated with aging in a cohort of retired professional football players in comparison with a non-athlete population. T1-weighted MRI scans of 38 retired Canadian Football League (ex-CFL) players and 21 age-matched healthy controls were pre-processed using our standard pipeline: image intensity non-uniformity correction, intensity range normalization, and stereotaxic registration. The images were then non-linearly warped to an average template brain of 152 healthy young individuals (MNI-ICBM-152). Deformation Based Morphometry (DBM) was performed using MNI MINC tools. Voxel-wise deformation maps were then correlated with age and corrected for multiple comparisons using False Discovery Rate (FDR), thresholded at 0.05. The results show significant correlations between volume change and aging in ex-CFL subjects; i.e. enlargement in ventricular regions (r=0.67,p<0.002) and shrinkage in subcortical areas in the left and right hippocampi (r=-0.66,p<0.002; r=-0.68,p<0.002 respectively) as well as the left and right thalami (r=-0.66,p<0.002; r=-0.68,p<0.002 respectively). A weaker but similar relationship was observed in the control group, possibly due to a smaller population size (see Table 1). Figures 1.a,c show correlation coefficients overlaid on ICBM template for ventricular regions for the ex-CFL and control groups. Figure 1.b shows the significant FDR corrected p-value map for the ex-CFL cohort. Figures 2.a-c show similar images for subcortical regions. The color-coded bars in Figures 1.a-c and 2.a-c represent correlation coefficients values: warm colors correspond to regions of enlargement with age i.e. ventricles; cold colors correspond to areas negatively correlated with age i.e. hippocampi and thalami. Figure 2.b shows the significant regions after FDR correction in the ex-CFL. Table 1 shows correlation coefficients and FDR corrected p-values for the two groups for areas indicated by arrows. The uncorrected p-values for the control group did not survive FDR correction. Our results revealed extensive changes associated with age in the ex-CFL population. The changes predominantly involved volume decreases in the hippocampi and thalami, and volume increases in the ventricles. DBM may be a sensitive measure for detecting focal brain atrophy in patients that have suffered multiple concussions. Correlation coefficient for the ex-CFL group Significant FDR corrected p values for the ex-CFL group Correlation coefficient for the control group Correlation coefficient for the ex-CFL group Significant FDR corrected p values for the ex-CFL group Correlation coefficient for the control group
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".