Real-time, whole-brain, temporally resolved pressure responses in translational head impact.

Abstract

Theoretical debate still exists on the role of linear acceleration ( a lin) on the risk of brain injury. Recent injury metrics only consider head rotational acceleration ( a rot) but not a lin, despite that real-world on-field head impacts suggesting a lin significantly improves a concussion risk function. These controversial findings suggest a practical challenge in integrating theory and real-world experiment. Focusing on tissue-level mechanical responses estimated from finite-element (FE) models of the human head, rather than impact kinematics alone, may help address this debate. However, the substantial computational cost incurred (runtime and hardware) poses a significant barrier for their practical use. In this study, we established a real-time technique to estimate whole-brain a lin-induced pressures. Three hydrostatic atlas pressures corresponding to translational impacts (referred to as 'brain print') along the three major axes were pre-computed. For an arbitrary a lin profile at any instance in time, the atlas pressures were linearly scaled and then superimposed to estimate whole-brain responses. Using 12 publically available, independently measured or reconstructed real-world a lin profiles representative of a range of impact/injury scenarios, the technique was successfully validated (except for one case with an extremely short impulse of approx. 1 ms). The computational cost to estimate whole-brain pressure responses for an entire a lin profile was less than 0.1 s on a laptop versus typically hours on a high-end multicore computer. These findings suggest the potential of the simple, yet effective technique to enable future studies to focus on tissue-level brain responses, rather than solely relying on global head impact kinematics that have plagued early and contemporary brain injury research to date.