Microstructural Damage Progression in Repetitive Head Trauma

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

This work will study repetitive mild traumatic brain injury. This type of injury is an important and dangerous type of head injury in which a person may be exposed to several repeated minor head impacts. Individually, these minor impacts are unlikely to cause serious injury. However, each exposure may cause minor tissue damage that accumulates. Over time, this increases the risk of serious brain injury. The connection between the brain and the skull determines how each impact affects the brain. This research will quantify how repeated head impacts damage the brain/skull interface and evaluate how this damage increases the risk of traumatic brain injury. Data and methods from this study will provide guidance to improve detection of mild traumatic brain injury. These results will also enhance prediction of those at risk of severe traumatic brain injury. Ultimately, these results will contribute to return-to-work/play guidelines. These data will also lead to a more accurate understanding of repeated head trauma and improve design criteria for automobiles, helmets, and other protective devices. This project will involve undergraduate researchers and contribute to their professional development. Outreach to the general public will also expand the reach of the project. Computational biomechanics of traumatic brain injury has historically focused on single head impacts and has not considered cumulative damage, ignoring a potentially critical component of individualized head injury risk. The objectives of this research are to characterize progressive mechanical damage at the interface between the brain and the skull and to evaluate how damage to this connection affects progressive damage to the underlying brain tissue. To achieve this objective, the research team will experimentally measure tissue damage progression in response to repeated exposures in experiments on meninges and blood vessels, and generate constitutive models that capture damage with each exposure. A multiscale modeling approach will be used to efficiently incorporate the microstructural constitutive formulations into a macroscale model of traumatic brain injury. The constitutive formulations and computational framework developed from this proposal will fill key knowledge gaps necessary to understand progressive damage to the brain and other neural structures. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.