Reaction time impairments in decision-making networks as a diagnostic marker for traumatic brain injuries and neurological diseases

Abstract

**Please note that the full text is embargoed** ABSTRACT: The presence of diffuse Focal Axonal Swellings (FAS) is a hallmark cellular feature in many neurological diseases and traumatic brain injury. Among other things, the FAS have a significant impact on spike-train encodings that propagate through the affected neurons, leading to compromised signal processing on a neuronal network level. This work merges, for the first time, three fields of study: (i) signal processing in excitatory-inhibitory (EI) networks of neurons via population codes, (ii) decision-making theory driven by the production of evidence from stimulus, and (iii) compromised spike-train propagation through FAS. As such, we demonstrate a mathematical architecture capable of characterizing compromised decision-making driven by cellular mechanisms. The computational model also leads to several novel predictions and diagnostics for understanding injury level and cognitive deficits, including a key finding that decision-making reaction times, rather than accuracy, are indicative of network level damage. The results have a number of translational implications, including that the level of network damage can be characterized by the reaction times in simple cognitive and motor tests. [This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Computational Neuroscience. The final authenticated version is available online at:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10827-017-0643-y]