Abstract
Recent mouse brain injury experiments examine diffuse axonal injury resulting from accelerative head rotations. Evaluating brain deformation during these events would provide valuable information on tissue level thresholds for brain injury, but there are many challenges to imaging the brain’s mechanical response during dynamic loading events, such as a blunt head impact. To address this shortcoming, we present an experimentally validated computational biomechanics model of the mouse brain that predicts tissue deformation, given the motion of the mouse head during laboratory experiments. First, we developed a finite element model of the mouse brain that computes tissue strains, given the same head rotations as previously conducted in situ hemicephalic mouse brain experiments. Second, we calibrated the model using a single brain segment, and then validated the model based on the spatial and temporal strain responses of other regions. The result is a computational tool that will provide researchers with the ability to predict brain tissue strains that occur during mouse laboratory experiments, and to link the experiments to the resulting neuropathology, such as diffuse axonal injury.
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Abbreviations
- MPS:
-
Maximum principal strain
- \(E_{xx}\) :
-
Normal strain in the X direction
- \(E_{yy}\) :
-
Normal strain in the Y direction
- \(E_{xy}\) :
-
Shear strain in the X–Y direction
- \({\mathbf{E}}\) :
-
Green–Lagrange strain tensor
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully thank Dr. Susumu Mori at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for providing the mouse brain imaging data (accessed through https://cmrm.med.jhmi.edu/) used for the geometric basis of our finite element model.
Funding
This work was supported in part by the National Health Mission Area of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the US National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke (NIH Grant NS05595).
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CB contributed to conceptualization, methodology; formal analysis, investigation, visualization, and writing, (original draft), LV was involved in supervision and writing (original draft), AB contributed to conceptualization, methodology, and formal analysis, and writing (original draft), and KTR contributed to supervision and writing (original draft).
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Bradfield, C., Voo, L., Bhaduri, A. et al. Validation of a computational biomechanical mouse brain model for rotational head acceleration. Biomech Model Mechanobiol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10237-024-01843-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10237-024-01843-5