Post-acute traumatic brain injury recovery: architecture of an illustrative curated evidence registry
- 1Department of Neurosurgery, Tiantai People’s Hospital of Zhejiang Province (Tiantai Branch of Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital)
Abstract
Introduction: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) recovery is shaped by secondary neuroinflammatory and neurovascular responses, injury severity, pre-injury health, rehabilitation timing and care setting. Yet rehabilitation evidence is commonly organized around interventions rather than the clinical decision context in which an intervention is considered.
Methods: We developed TBI-RECOVER to describe the architecture of a curated post-acute TBI recovery evidence registry across clinical decision-context signals, recovery domains, outcomes, care settings and nominal source roles. English-language PubMed records from database inception to 21 August 2026 were retrieved through seven complementary recovery-oriented search strands. Exact queries, PMIDs, XML metadata, retrieval failures and rule-based triage decisions were archived. An illustrative 50-source curated registry of guidelines, consensus documents and high-level evidence syntheses was assembled from returned records. Each entry received a primary recovery domain, a nominal source-role category, severity, recovery-time, care-setting, age and comorbidity reporting signals, and one or more outcome labels. Selection rationales were recorded for every entry; no numerical domain quota was used.
Results: The curated registry comprised 50 sources after title/abstract and multidisciplinary re-audit: 10 guidelines or consensus documents, 16 intervention syntheses, 10 implementation or service-evidence sources, 13 measurement or prognostic-evidence sources and one protocol or methods source. Forty-six entries occupied the score 12 or higher triage stratum. Independent stratified manual relevance validation confirmed the original triage assignments, and multidisciplinary review confirmed the prespecified source-role and primary-domain classifications. The stored score was reproduced exactly for all 2,529 parsed records. Age language was absent in 23 sources, and no molecular/biochemical marker, cell-type or brain-region signal was present in the curated title/abstract metadata.
Discussion: TBI-RECOVER provides a transparent structure for locating high-level recovery evidence, specifying clinical decision-context fields for future synthesis, and designing stratified rehabilitation and implementation studies.
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BibTeX
@article{cao2026postacute,
title = {{Post-acute traumatic brain injury recovery: architecture of an illustrative curated evidence registry}},
author = {Fangchuan Cao and Liangdie Xu and Weiyang Wang and Ting Yu and Guangda Xu},
journal = {Frontiers in Neurology},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.3389/fneur.2026.1979438},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2026.1979438/full},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Post-acute traumatic brain injury recovery: architecture of an illustrative curated evidence registry
AU - Fangchuan Cao
AU - Liangdie Xu
AU - Weiyang Wang
AU - Ting Yu
AU - Guangda Xu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
JO - Frontiers in Neurology
DO - 10.3389/fneur.2026.1979438
UR - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2026.1979438/full
AB - Introduction: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) recovery is shaped by secondary neuroinflammatory and neurovascular responses, injury severity, pre-injury health, rehabilitation timing and care setting. Yet rehabilitation evidence is commonly organized around interventions rather than the clinical decision context in which an intervention is considered. Methods: We developed TBI-RECOVER to describe the architecture of a curated post-acute TBI recovery evidence registry across clinical decision-context signals, recovery domains, outcomes, care settings and nominal source roles. English-language PubMed records from database inception to 21 August 2026 were retrieved through seven complementary recovery-oriented search strands. Exact queries, PMIDs, XML metadata, retrieval failures and rule-based triage decisions were archived. An illustrative 50-source curated registry of guidelines, consensus documents and high-level evidence syntheses was assembled from returned records. Each entry received a primary recovery domain, a nominal source-role category, severity, recovery-time, care-setting, age and comorbidity reporting signals, and one or more outcome labels. Selection rationales were recorded for every entry; no numerical domain quota was used. Results: The curated registry comprised 50 sources after title/abstract and multidisciplinary re-audit: 10 guidelines or consensus documents, 16 intervention syntheses, 10 implementation or service-evidence sources, 13 measurement or prognostic-evidence sources and one protocol or methods source. Forty-six entries occupied the score 12 or higher triage stratum. Independent stratified manual relevance validation confirmed the original triage assignments, and multidisciplinary review confirmed the prespecified source-role and primary-domain classifications. The stored score was reproduced exactly for all 2,529 parsed records. Age language was absent in 23 sources, and no molecular/biochemical marker, cell-type or brain-region signal was present in the curated title/abstract metadata. Discussion: TBI-RECOVER provides a transparent structure for locating high-level recovery evidence, specifying clinical decision-context fields for future synthesis, and designing stratified rehabilitation and implementation studies.
SN - 1664-2295
ER -