MODELING BLAST-RELATED BRAIN INJURY

Recent military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the wartime effect of traumatic brain in-jury (TBI). While it is not clear why TBI has been so prominent in these particular conflicts, one reason may be that improvements in body armor have led to in-creased survivability of blasts. Closed traumatic brain injury covers a spectrum of central nervous system (CNS) injuries and mechanisms, but it is broadly char-acterized as mild (mTBI), moderate, or severe TBI, with mTBI occurring most frequently. Blunt, ballis-tic, and blast effects may all contribute to CNS injury, but blast in particular has been suggested as a primary cause of military TBI. Little is currently known about the effects of blasts on the CNS; injury thresholds have not been established, and even direct transmission of the non-linear shock wave into the intra-cranial cav-ity and brain is disputed. In this study, we demon-strate the potential for a blast shockwave to directly affect the CNS using coupled computational fluid-solid dynamics simulation. The model includes a complex finite element model of the head and intracranial con-tents. The effects of threshold and lethal blast lung injury were compared with concussive impact injury using the full head model