Mri - Head Injury Biomechanics Measurement System

Mild traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and concussions are currently a major Public health concern that dominates our lives from adolescent activities to professional sports to everyday falls. An estimated 1.6 to 3.8 million sports-related concussions occur in US alone. Though there are many research efforts to describe and treat concussion medically, trauma to the head is essentially a biomechanical problem. The PIs have extensive experience with TBI and blast brain trauma research. They believe that the problem can be defined by specifying the biomechanical boundary value problem through prescribing the right geometry and material and initial/boundary conditions through carefully conducted experiments and modeling. The head injury biomechanics measurement system will enable the PIs to control and measure the biomechanical parameters that bound concussive conditions. This effort will lead in developing a Brain Injury Criterion (BIC) similar to the development of the Head Injury Criterion for automotive accidents. This effort will fill the important fundamental knowledge gap in current traumatic concussive brain injury research.

Technical Description
The major goal of both PIs and the Center for Injury Biomechanics, Materials and Medicine (CIBM3) is to provide a link between external loading of the head to the spatial and temporal stress and strains that cause injury to the brain. The Head Injury Biomechanical Measurement System proposed here is an enabling component that will allow researchers to precisely replicate the injury event, accurately measure stresses and strains at multiple discrete locations and help develop bio-fidelic computer models to establish the relationship between external loading and tissue level state of stress. This will be important to researchers internationally to replicate clinically relevant biomechanical injury parameters in their models to investigate the traumatic mechanisms of concussive injury.

The proposed Head Injury Biomechanical Measurement System will be a unique system in the academic research community. This unique research approach of using cadavers in addition to physical dummy models will add clinical relevance towards developing a BIC and the potential to be a standard in the field.