Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Predictors Based on Angular Accelerations During Impacts

Abstract

Although Head Injury Criterion (HIC) is an effective criterion for head injuries caused by linear acceleration such as skull fractures, no criteria for head injuries caused by rotational kinematics has been accepted as effective so far. This study proposed two criteria based on angular accelerations for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which we call Rotational Injury Criterion (RIC) and Power Rotational Head Injury Criterion (PRHIC). Concussive and non-concussive head acceleration data obtained from football head impacts were utilized to develop new injury criteria. A well-validated human brain Finite Element (FE) model was employed to find out effective injury criteria for TBI. Correlation analyses were performed between the proposed criteria and FE-based brain injury predictors such as Cumulative Strain Damage Measure (CSDM), which is defined as the percent volume of the brain that exceeds a specified first principal strain threshold, proposed to predict Diffuse Axonal Injury (DAI) which is one of TBI. The RIC was significantly correlated with the CSDMs with the strain thresholds of less than 15% (R > 0.89), which might predict mild TBI. In addition, PRHIC was also strongly correlated with the CSDMs with the strain thresholds equal to or greater than 20% (R > 0.90), which might predict more severe TBI.

Biomechanical analysis of acute subdural hematoma resulting from judo

“…Therefore, the angular acceleration observed in this study (sagittal plane rotation of 3315 ± 168 rad/s 2 using Osoto-gari) may be sufficient to cause ASDH. As previously suggested, a single biomechanical measure, such as linear acceleration, is not the most sensitive biomechanical measure for determining ASDH risk (2,6). The combination of linear and angular kinematic parameters is likely to have the greatest predictive capabilities for ASDH.…”

A concept for mitigating head injury under translational blunt impact

“…Although metrics based on translational impacts have proven to be useful in predicting severe injury (including skull fracture and brain contusion), recent studies have highlighted the importance of angular acceleration on concussive injuries such as subdural hematomas and diffuse axonal injury [17]. Such injuries appear to arise when the strain in brain tissue exceeds a critical value [8,22,30].…”

“…Such injuries appear to arise when the strain in brain tissue exceeds a critical value [8,22,30]. Metrics based on peak angular velocity or peak angular acceleration have been proposed to characterise the severity of impacts involving rotational motion [17,32].…”

Traumatic brain injury in pedestrian–vehicle collisions: Convexity and suitability of some functionals used as injury metrics

“…A more sophisticated attempt to combine the functional form of HIC and 179 HIP, is Power Rotation Head Injury Criterion [8]:…”

“…Many different studies have pointed the importance of abrupt rotations of 296 the head for predicting TBI [8,10,18,20] and, for this reason some au-297 thors tried to generalize the functional form of HIC in order to incorporate 298 the effect of rotation. Experimental data in this study showed that RIC or 299 PRHIC are not adequate generalizations (see Fig.…”