Medical document translation
background: I am a PhD student studying auditory neuroscience, epilepsy, and neurosurgery-related language impairment. i have experience working in the neurosurg department of a hospital and reading MRIs, but i am NOT a medical professional.

HISTORY: you had a concussion and didn’t black out.

TECHNIQUE: we gave you an MRI. Seems like they got a pretty good range of scans. All the words you don’t understand here are just different types of MRI that are better at seeing different things (blood vessels, neurons, etc).

CONTRAST: they didn’t inject you with anything that would make your brain matter more visible on the MRIs, which makes sense for a concussion. Brain tumor people usually have this stuff called “gadolinium” injected into their brain to make it easier to see the tumors.

FINDINGS:
Ok heres the big stuff.
* Your sinuses are kinda messed up:
>> your adenoids (little flappy things next to your uvula, aka the “punching bag” in your throat that makes you gag if you poke it) are swollen.
>> your nasopharyngeal airway (aka the connection between your nostrils and your lungs) is more narrow, probably because your swollen adenoids are in the way.
>> everything else seems good

* you have some CSF built up
>> CSF stands for “cerebrospinal fluid” and its basically the liquid that your brain sits in. Imagine your skull is a jar filled with water that contains a brain. The CSF is the water in this analogy.
>> when you hit your head (like you did in your concussion), your brain moves around a little bit and CSF can become trapped in places it’s not supposed to be. Here your CSF is built up around the posterior fossa, which is one of the bone plates that make up the skull.
>> the other piece of jargon here is “ventricle” which just means part of the brain that makes CSF.
>> CSF buildup, commonly referred to as “CSF leak” is a type of minor “traumatic brain injury.” It’s a semi-common thing that happens after concussion. I don’t know very much about it (AGAIN I’M NOT A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL).

* theres no problems with your white matter
>> white matter refers to the fibers that connect neurons together. the outer layer of the brain is the grey matter (the cell bodies of the neurons) and the deeper layers are mostly white matter.

* they compared the volume of parts of your brain to the average brain volumes
>> your cerebellum has less gray matter: the cerebellum is at the back of your head and controls a bunch of stuff related to motor movement (we don’t 100% understand it).
>> theres a bunch of other crap here about different lobes but i don’t think any of it is necessary related to your concussion. they say it’s due to “prior trauma” so you probably know better about this than I do. looks like it’s mostly in the hippocampus and temporal lobes which are regions related to language and memory and also commonly impaired in epilepsy. do you have a history of seizures by any chance? the other region that has less gray matter is the occipital lobe which controls vision. they say it’s smaller on the left side which means you may have some problems with vision out of your right eye (the visual regions control opposite sides of the visual field, so left -> right and right -> left)

IMPRESSION: This is how doctors say “TLDR”
1. your adenoids are swollen and partially blocking your nasal airway, sorta where it connects to your throat in the back
2. you have some CSF (brain jar liquid) built up in the back of your head around the cerebellum.
3. your cerebellum, hippocampus, temporal and occipital lobes all have suffered some loss of grey matter (neuron cell bodies). they only think the cerebellum loss is related to this concussion.
4. your white matter (connections between neurons) is good and didn’t have any damage to it.