Assessment of Sport-Related Brain Injuries with Rapid Objective Perimetry

Sport-related mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) or concussion is common and has long-term implications. The lack of diagnostically accurate, rapid, and easy-to-administer tests exacerbates the problem. We evaluated the objectiveFIELD Analyser^® (OFA^®) for mTBI. This cross-sectional study included athletes who had sustained a concussion, and two groups of controls: the putative control group (pCG) comprising rugby players who claimed they had never had a concussion, and a non-rugby normal control group (nCG). Two OFA tests, the 8 min (OFA30) and the rapid 90 s (OFA30-12), were performed. Discrimination was performed against both the control groups using the Area Under Receiver Operating Curves (AUROC) and Hedge's g standardised effect size. The athletes were divided into the Acute Group, with 42 athletes tested within 15.4 ± 13.6 days of mTBI, and the Chronic Group, with 23 athletes tested within 941.5 ± 769.0 days. Subjects were age-matched (22.4 ± 3.06 years). For the nCG, OFA30-12 performed better than OFA30: with Hedge's g values of 1.22 in acute and 1.45 in chronic cases, compared with 0.93 for acute and 1.00 for chronic cases. AUROCs performed similarly. Notably, when compared with the pCG, both tests showed poorer diagnostic power. OFA perimetry showed potential as reliable, rapid test for assessing concussion. The results cannot be generalized to the first 72 h following a concussion due to insufficient data from participants assessed within this early period.