- Huang, Ming‐Xiong;
- Huang, Charles W;
- Harrington, Deborah L;
- Robb‐Swan, Ashley;
- Angeles‐Quinto, Annemarie;
- Nichols, Sharon;
- Huang, Jeffrey W;
- Le, Lu;
- Rimmele, Carl;
- Matthews, Scott;
- Drake, Angela;
- Song, Tao;
- Ji, Zhengwei;
- Cheng, Chung‐Kuan;
- Shen, Qian;
- Foote, Ericka;
- Lerman, Imanuel;
- Yurgil, Kate A;
- Hansen, Hayden B;
- Naviaux, Robert K;
- Dynes, Robert;
- Baker, Dewleen G;
- Lee, Roland R
Combat-related mild traumatic brain injury (cmTBI) is a leading cause of sustained physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral disabilities in Veterans and active-duty military personnel. Accurate diagnosis of cmTBI is challenging since the symptom spectrum is broad and conventional neuroimaging techniques are insensitive to the underlying neuropathology. The present study developed a novel deep-learning neural network method, 3D-MEGNET, and applied it to resting-state magnetoencephalography (rs-MEG) source-magnitude imaging data from 59 symptomatic cmTBI individuals and 42 combat-deployed healthy controls (HCs). Analytic models of individual frequency bands and all bands together were tested. The All-frequency model, which combined delta-theta (1-7 Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), beta (15-30 Hz), and gamma (30-80 Hz) frequency bands, outperformed models based on individual bands. The optimized 3D-MEGNET method distinguished cmTBI individuals from HCs with excellent sensitivity (99.9 ± 0.38%) and specificity (98.9 ± 1.54%). Receiver-operator-characteristic curve analysis showed that diagnostic accuracy was 0.99. The gamma and delta-theta band models outperformed alpha and beta band models. Among cmTBI individuals, but not controls, hyper delta-theta and gamma-band activity correlated with lower performance on neuropsychological tests, whereas hypo alpha and beta-band activity also correlated with lower neuropsychological test performance. This study provides an integrated framework for condensing large source-imaging variable sets into optimal combinations of regions and frequencies with high diagnostic accuracy and cognitive relevance in cmTBI. The all-frequency model offered more discriminative power than each frequency-band model alone. This approach offers an effective path for optimal characterization of behaviorally relevant neuroimaging features in neurological and psychiatric disorders.