In Vivo Tissue-Level Thresholds for Spinal Cord Injury Available to Purchase

Traumatic loading conditions, such as those experienced during car accidents or falls, can lead to spinal cord injury (SCI), resulting in permanent functional damage [1]. A better understanding of the biomechanical causes of SCI and knowledge of the tolerance of spinal cord tissue to mechanical loading is critical in understanding how mechanisms of injury lead to neurologic deficits, as well as designing methods to prevent SCI. Finite element analysis (FEA) has become an important and cost effective tool to investigate the biomechanics of trauma. FEA has been used to study a variety of biomechanical analyses of trauma, including brain injury and spine injury biomechanics, but there have been limited analyses on spinal cord injury (SCI) [2–5]. In fact, despite the prevalence of small animal models in the neuroscience community used to study SCI, there have been no published analyses of in vivo models of SCI.