Simulation of Head Impact Leading to Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is an unfortunate consequence of many civilian accident and military combat scenarios. Examples include head impact sustained in sports activities and automobile accidents as well as blast wave loading from detonated improvised explosive devices (IED). In the United States, over 5 million people live with disabilities associated with TBI (online report at www.cdc.gov/ncipc/tbi/TBI.htm). We present the results of a scoping study simulating the earlytime wave interactions in the human head as a result of impact with a windshield in an automobile accident, a scenario leading to insipient conditions necessary for the onset of TBI. Our simulation results demonstrate that wave interactions within the head generate significant levels of stress at localized regions within the brain on an early time scale (~1 msec) prior to any overall motion of the head. The spatial distribution of these localized regions is consistent with the coup-contrecoup TBI mechanism observed in some patients that experience such impact events. In addition, smaller, localized regions with high stress occur in other parts of our brain model suggesting a mechanism for differential clinical outcome in TBI patients subjected to similar parameters of injury.