Brain Damage Newsroom

Simulation Study Of Head Impact Leading To Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is an unfortunate consequence of many civilian accident and military related scenarios. Examples include head impact sustained in sports activities and automobile accidents as well as blast wave loading from improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Depending on the extent of the damage, TBI is associated with a loss of the functional capability of the brain to perform cognitive and memory tasks, process information, and a variety motor and coordination problems. In many instances, the person involved in the event will not experience the full loss of brain function until days or weeks after the event has occurred. This suggests the existence of threshold levels and/or conditions of mechanical stress experienced by the brain that, if exceeded, lead to evolving symptoms of TBI in the days or weeks following an accident.

To avoid a trial-and-error approach involving large-scale medical testing of laboratory animals to study various scenarios leading to TBI, we have developed numerical simulation models of the human head to study various impact and blast wave conditions that lead to the onset of TBI. To accomplish this task, we have recently established a collaborative effort between Sandia researchers and the Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery (MIND) Institute, at the University of New Mexico. This collaboration permits us to create accurate models of the various tissues and geometries of the human head as well as to conduct simulations of head impact in order to establish a correlation between the incipient levels and durations of stress and strain energy experienced by the brain and the onset of TBI.

In this note, we present the results of a small study that simulates the early-time wave interactions occurring within the human head as a result of impact of an unrestrained person with the windshield of an automobile in a 30 mph head-on collision into a stationary barrier. We have conducted various simulations of this scenario over the past few years; however, the current work has been carried out with a higher fidelity head model over an extended simulation timescale. Read more at sandia.gov