Abstract
Realistic human head models are of great interest in traumatic brain injury research and in the forensic pathology courtroom and teaching. Due to a lack of biomechanical data, the human dura mater is underrepresented in head models. This study provides tensile data of 73 fresh human cranial dura mater samples retrieved from an area between the anterior middle and the posterior middle meningeal artery. Tissues were adapted to their native water content using the osmotic stress technique. Tensile tests were conducted under quasi-static uniaxial testing conditions with simultaneous digital image correlation. Human temporal dura mater is mechanically highly variable with regards to its elastic modulus of 70 ± 44 MPa, tensile strength of 7 ± 4 MPa, and maximum strain of 11 ± 3 percent. Mechanical properties of the dura mater did not vary significantly between side nor sex and decreased with the age of the cadaver. Both elastic modulus and tensile strength appear to have constant mechanical parameters within the first 139 hours post mortem. The mechanical properties provided by this study can help to improve computational and physical human head models. These properties under quasi-static conditions do not require adjustments for side nor sex, whereas adjustments of tensile properties accompanied with normal aging may be of interest.
Highlights
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major burden for public health care systems world-wide with about 2.8 million emergency department visits and 56,000 deaths in the United States or 82,000 througout Europe annually[1,2]
The purpose of this study is to provide basic biomechanical data of human temporal dura mater obtained from 73 cadavers in a fresh and chemically unfixed condition
In this current biomechanical study utilizing human dura mater we addressed the following hypotheses: 1. Elastic modulus, ultimate tensile stress and maximum strain of human dura mater change with age
Summary
The underlying mechanisms of the head injury (e.g. blunt vs sharp trauma, non-penetrating vs penetrating trauma, acceleration-deceleration vs rotational trauma or impact damage vs diffuse axonal damage) are required to be settled without a doubt in courtrooms to discharge or convict suspects of a crime In addition to these forensic questions, a thorough understanding of the mechanisms involved with head injury is essential for the determination of treatment in clinical care. Thali et al reproduced tissue bridges and a periosteum pocket, after applying blunt forces to their skin-skull-brain model, using silicon as a skin replacement material and latex for the periosteum[4,12]. The elastic modulus of human dura mater increases and ultimate tensile load decreases with longer post-mortem delay (PMD), due to cellular autolysis and decomposition after death
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