Biomechanical Assessment of the Bridging Vein Rupture of Blast-Induced Traumatic Brain Injury Using the Finite Element Human Head Model

The incidence of the blast-induced traumatic brain injury (bTBI) among American troops in battle environments is dramatically high in recent years. Shock wave, a production of detonation, is a brief and acute overpressure wave that travels supersonically with a magnitude which can be several times higher than atmospheric pressure. Primary bTBI means that human exposure to shock wave itself without any other impact of solid objects can still result in the impairment of cerebral tissues. The mechanism of this type of brain injury is different from that of the conventional TBI, and has not been fully understood. So far, it is believed that the shock wave transmitted through skull and into cerebral tissues may induce specific injury patterns. This study is trying to develop a methodology to numerically investigate the mechanism of the blast-induced subdural hematoma (bSDH), which is caused by bridging vein rupture. The effort of this study can be divided to three major parts: first, a finite element (FE) model of human head is developed from the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of a real human head to contain skull, CSF and brain. Numerically simulated shock waves transmits through the human head model whose mechanical responses are recorded; second, in order to obtain the mechanical properties of human bridging vein, an standard inflation test of blood vessels is conducted on a real human bridging vein sample gained from autopsy. Material parameters are found by fitting the experimental data to an anisotropic hyperelastic constitutive model for blood vessel (Gerhard A. Holzapfel 2000); third, The bridging vein rupture in bTBI is evaluated by the finite element analysis of a separate human bridging vein model under the external loadings in terms of the internal pressure and relative skull-brain motion which are extracted from the mechanical response of the subarachnoid space of the head in the blast-head simulation of the first part.