 Hello, my name is Rameka Mito and I'm a postdoctoral researcher from the Flory Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health here in Melbourne. I'm going to talk a little bit about concussion and about the research we've been doing at the Flory to investigate brain changes after concussion. So concussion is a mild form of traumatic brain injury, which is induced by biomechanical forces transmitting through the head. People who suffer a concussion may lose consciousness, although they don't necessarily have to to have suffered a concussion. What all of these individuals will experience is neurological impairment and symptoms over the hours to days following injury. Now there are a whole range of neurological symptoms that an individual who has a concussion may experience. And these include things like headaches, nausea, memory problems, mood changes or sleep disturbances. In most cases these symptoms will have completely resolved by a week or two following the injury. However in some individuals these symptoms persist for weeks to months following the injury, which can be really debilitating. So when someone suffers a concussion, we currently cannot predict whether the symptoms will disappear in a given individual after a few days, or if that individual might suffer longer terms, consequences or longer term symptoms. One of the reasons we cannot predict an individual person's outcome is because we can't actually see that concussion injury in the brain. So we don't really know where and what the injury to the brain is. Now what I mean by this is if we were to perform a brain scan in an individual who had just suffered a concussion, a standard brain MRI scan would not show anything abnormal in that individual's brain, at least not unless they had suffered a more serious brain injury. So if we can't see what the brain injury is after a concussion, it makes it really hard to say when that brain has recovered, and it also makes it incredibly hard to predict whether an individual will suffer longer term symptoms. What we really need is advanced neuroimaging techniques that can detect concussion in the brain. At the flurry we develop advanced brain imaging techniques using magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. We apply these MRI techniques to examine various neurological conditions and disorders. Over the past few years we've been using these advanced MRI techniques to investigate brain changes that arise as a result of concussion. And we've done this by comparing groups of individuals who had recently suffered a sports-related concussion to similar individuals who had not suffered a concussion. One of the techniques we've been using is called diffusion MRI, and this is a technique that can be used to examine the brain's white matter or the brain's wiring. So behind me I have some images depicting the brain's wiring, and we've been examining changes to this brain wiring after concussion. What we've found is that there are really subtle changes to the brain wiring in the first two weeks following concussion. But these changes do not seem to persist beyond two weeks, at least in most individuals. So this is a really promising indication that we might have a technique that can detect concussion at the acute stages of injury. But this research we've performed has so far just been in group studies, and what we really need to be able to do to translate this technique into the clinic is to use these techniques to detect concussion in individual people. So with the help of the Brain Foundation, we hope to further our advanced brain imaging techniques so that we can use these technologies to detect concussion in individual people. Thank you very much.