According to published literature, over 50% of confirmed cases of mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) go undiagnosed by emergency room physicians.  The failure of emergency medical professionals to diagnose mild TBI is due in part to the simple fact that they are trained to triage and treat the most pressing injuries first.  Often, trauma patients present to an emergency room in Florida with obvious and significant physical injuries including orthopedic injuries, soft tissue injuries and a constellation of symptoms that are secondary to these conditions.  Many times the shock of the recent trauma, the pain, and the medications and treatments prescribed by the emergency physicians can cause symptoms that are similar to the hallmarks of mild TBI that inadvertently mask the anticipated changes resulting from the TBI itself.  Thus, many times, patients will be discharged from the emergency room without any diagnosis or documentation that they have suffered a brain injury.

Even in cases where the patient has sustained a documented head trauma or is initially suspected of suffering from one or more TBI hallmarks, the emergency room staff is often limited in their ability to appropriately diagnose a mild TBI.  Structural imaging studies like CT and MRI, when used to image brain tissues, are designed to show only gross structural abnormalities in brain tissues.  Unfortunately, these imaging modalities have limited resolution that does not allow radiologists to see damage to brain tissues at the cellular level.  Mild TBI, by definition, involves damage to axons or brain cells at a level which is well below the resolution of even the most powerful MRI and CT scanners in use today.  Thus, the vast majority of TBI patients that have brain CT and/or MRI imaging that is read as normal by the radiologist.