Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology
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Understanding the mechanisms of traumatic ocular injury is helpful to make accurate diagnoses before the symptoms emerge and to develop specific eye protection. The comprehension of the dynamics of primary blast injury mechanisms is a challenging issue. The question is whether the pressure wave propagation and reflection alone could cause ocular damage. ⋯ Therefore, tests aimed at evaluating the response of porcine eyes to blast overpressure generated by firecrackers explosion were performed. The orbital cavity effect was considered mounting the enucleated eyes inside a dummy orbit. The experimental measurements obtained during the explosion tests presented in this paper corroborate the numerical evidence of a high-frequency pressure amplification, enhancing the loading on the ocular tissues, attributable to the orbital bony walls surrounding the eye.
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Biomech Model Mechanobiol · Aug 2017
Anisotropic finite element models for brain injury prediction: the sensitivity of axonal strain to white matter tract inter-subject variability.
Computational models incorporating anisotropic features of brain tissue have become a valuable tool for studying the occurrence of traumatic brain injury. The tissue deformation in the direction of white matter tracts (axonal strain) was repeatedly shown to be an appropriate mechanical parameter to predict injury. However, when assessing the reliability of axonal strain to predict injury in a population, it is important to consider the predictor sensitivity to the biological inter-subject variability of the human brain. ⋯ On the contrary, the localization of the maximum axonal strain was consistent: the peak of strain was typically located in a 2 cm3 volume of the brain. For a sport concussive event, the predictor was capable of discerning between non-injurious and concussed populations in several areas of the brain. It was concluded that, despite its sensitivity to biological variability, axonal strain is an appropriate mechanical parameter to predict traumatic brain injury.