Diagnosis of blast-induced traumatic brain injury in rat based on terahertz spectroscopy of serum

In this paper, a novel strategy for diagnosis of bTBI is proposed by measuring terahertz (THz) spectroscopy of serum in a rat model. A compressed air-driven shock wave generator was used to establish bTBI model of rats. It was validated by a neurological deficit assessment method. The spectral differences of serum for different degrees of bTBI rats have been demonstrated by THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS). Moreover, based on the THz spectra of serum, the principal component analysis (PCA) and support vector machine (SVM) were performed to automatically identify the degrees of bTBI. The results indicate that THz spectroscopy could provide a sensitive, rapid and label-free diagnosis method for bTBI.