Modeling Head Motion During Explosive Events to Assess Brain Injury Severity in a Battlefield Environment

The occurrence of blast induced brain injury in individuals serving in Iraq and Afghanistan is dramatically higher than in past conflicts. This has been attributed in part to the prevalence of roadside improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. There is a call from the military medical community to reduce the reliance on victim self-reporting as the primary diagnosis technique to determine the likelihood of brain injury after a blast. This study demonstrates the utility of computational modeling in establishing clear criteria that denotes the probability of cerebral contusion and, thus, brain injury. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to establish the environment from a full range of threats. This is combined with bond graph modeling of varying levels of fidelity to estimate the dynamics of the skull and brain. Results clearly show that a boundary exists in the threat parameter space that determines whether brain injury occurs.