[en] Objectives
Recent military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the wartime effect of traumatic brain injury. The reason for the prominence of TBI in these particular conflicts as opposed to others is unclear but may result from the increased survivability of blast due to improvements in body armor. In the military context blunt, ballistic and blast effects may all contribute to CNS injury, however blast in particular, has been suggested as a primary cause of military TBI. While blast effects on some biological tissues, such as the lung, are documented in term of injury thresholds, this is not the case for the CNS. We hypothesized that using bio-fidelic models, allowing for fluid-solid interaction and basic material properties available in the literature, that a blast wave would interact with CNS tissue and cause a possible concussive effect.
Methods
The blast shockwave on CNS tissue was modeled using a coupled computational fluid-solid dynamic simulation. The model included a complex finite element mesh of the head and intra-cranial contents. The effects of threshold and 50% lethal blast lung injury were compared with concussive impact injury using the full head model allowing know upper and lower bounds of tissue injury to be applied using pulmonary injury as the reference tissue.
Results
The effects of a 50% lethal dose blast lung injury (LD50) were comparable with concussive impact injury using the DVBIC – MIT full head model.
Interpretation
CNS blast concussive effects were found to be similar between impact mild TBI and the blast field associated with LD50 lung blast injury sustained without personal protective equipment. With the ubiquitous use of personal protective equipment this suggests that blast concussive effects may more readily occur in personnel due to enhanced survivability in the current conflicts.
Disciplines :
Biotechnology
Author, co-author :
Moore, David; Walter Reed Army Medical Center > Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center
Jérusalem, Antoine; Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT > Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nyen, Michelle; Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT > Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Noels, Ludovic ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département d'aérospatiale et mécanique > Computational & Multiscale Mechanics of Materials (CM3)
Jaffee, Michael; Walter Reed Army Medical Center > Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center
Radovitzky, Raúl; Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT > Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department
Language :
English
Title :
Computational biology — Modeling of primary blast effects on the central nervous system
Publication date :
2009
Journal title :
NeuroImage
ISSN :
1053-8119
eISSN :
1095-9572
Publisher :
Elsevier Science, Orlando, United States - Florida
This work was support in full by financial aid from the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) through the Army Research Office
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