Publications Details

Verification and Validation of Simulation Framework for Analysis of Traumatic Brain Injury

Taylor, Paul A.; Ludwigsen, John S.; Ford, Corey C.; Vakhtin, Andrei A.

Many U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered blast-related, closed-head injuries as a result of being within non-lethal distance of a detonated improvised explosive device (IED). Consequently, we are conducting a modeling & simulation investigation, coupled with clinical diagnostics of brain injury, into the mechanisms associated with blast to the human head that give rise to traumatic brain injury (TBI). In particular, we are attempting to identify the specific conditions of focused stress wave energy within the brain, resulting from blast loading to the head, which define a threshold for persistent brain injury. As these threshold injury conditions are identified, one can then employ a modeling & simulation toolset to assess the efficacy of various helmet designs to mitigate blast exposure that would otherwise lead to traumatic brain injury. In this report, we describe our efforts to establish the role of stress wave interactions in the genesis of traumatic brain injury (TBI) from exposure to explosive blast. We discuss our effort to correlate simulation predictions with clinical assessments of TBI subjects whose brain injuries have been diagnosed by advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques. This work has been funded through the U.S. Naval Health Research Center, Office of Naval Research, Mr. James Mackiewicz, project funding manager.