Q30 Innovations regained full control of the device in 2018. Scientists knew by then the Q-Collar could not prevent concussions. Athletes including Luke Kuechly of the Carolina Panthers had had at least one concussion while wearing it. Dr. Myer said the company needed to find an objective measure that showed wearing the device could at least lower the risk of brain damage.
In 2018, Dr. Myer and his team began studying 284 high school football players on seven teams to see if scans of their brains before and after the season would reveal any differences between players who wore the Q-Collar and those who did not.
The players wore accelerometers inside their helmets to count the number of hits and their impact. When the scans were combined into a composite image for each group, they revealed, at certain levels of impact, microscopic changes in one area of the brain for some players who did not wear the collars and substantially different changes for those who wore them.
However, experts in the high tech imaging, known as D.T.I., cautioned against drawing too many conclusions based on those results.
Derek Jones, a professor at Cardiff University’s Brain Research Imaging Centre, in Wales, described D.T.I. technology as “very sensitive but not very specific.” He said the data it produces is difficult to interpret, especially in the complex regions of the brain that had produced the most significant results in the Q-Collar studies.
Dr. Shenton, the Harvard specialist, questioned the Q30 scientists’ interpretation of the data from their studies. She said the numbers reported go in the opposite direction of what a brain scientist might predict, and only in one narrow range of severity.
“They say, ‘We get a change and it doesn’t matter the direction,’” Dr. Shenton said. “It’s so not what you would expect.”