Impact induced traumatic brain injury (ITBI) describes brain injury from head impact not necessarily accompanied by skull fracture. For sufficiently abrupt head impact decelerations, ITBI results from brain tissue stress incurred as the brain crashes into the inside of the skull wall, displacing the surrounding cerebral spinal fluid (CSF). Proper helmet cushioning can damp the impact force and reduce ITBI. But force is mass times acceleration and commonly used helmet blunt impact standards are based only on acceleration thresholds. Here I show how this implies that present standards overestimate the minimum acceleration onset for ITBI by implicitly assuming that the brain is mechanically decoupled from the body. I quantify how an arbitrary orientation of the body with respect to impact direction increases the effective mass that should be used in calculating the required damping force and injury threshold accelerations. I suggest a practical method to incorporate the body mass and impact angle into ITBI helmet standards and provide direction for further work.
An accelerometer-only algorithm for determining the acceleration field of a rigid body, with application in studying the mechanics of mild Traumatic Brain Injury
Determining rigid body motion from accelerometer data through the square-root of a negative semi-definite tensor, with applications in mild traumatic brain injury
Scattering approach to diffusion quantifies axonal damage in brain injury
Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA（纽约大学医学学院放射科生物医学成像中心）；A.I. Virtanen Institute for Molecular Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland（东部芬兰大学A.I. Virtanen分子科学研究所）；Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA（马萨诸塞州总医院哈佛医学院生物医学成像中心）
