RESEARCH

Long Term Vision of Protecting the Brain

Current standards for head injury protection were reviewed to assess if substantial improvements could be made in the ability to predict conditions that will cause significant brain injuries. In the 35+ years that have elapsed since the adoption of the head injury criteria (H.I.C.) as a major standard in head protection, several important advances have been made in the laboratory toward understanding how mechanical factors further contribute to the occurrence of specific types of brain injury, the relative changes in the physical properties of selected cerebral tissues across regions, and the isolated tolerance of tissues subjected to mechanical forces that occur during impact. In parallel, computational power has grown from virtually nonexistent in the 1960’s to models in the 21st century that can accurately detail structures within the brain, its encasing structures, and the response of these model structures to impact. Clearly, there has been substantial progress in the ‘building blocks’ needed to make progress in predicting the occurrence of brain injuries

In the future, it is envisioned that current head injury standards will be replaced with a fundamentally new approach – a computationally based tool that will not only serve to better separate safe and unsafe environments, but will play a critical and essential role in the iterative design of products and technologies to reduce the incidence of brain injury.

We use the NHTSA naming convention and refer to this tool as SIMon, an acronym for Simulated Injury Monitoring. Ideally, the tool will be widely available to manufacturers, government researchers, and academic investigators. The tool will be ‘certified’ with the appropriate research to ensure that it is reliable, will provide an excellent confidence level for predicting harmful brain injuries, and will be dynamic, i.e. the tool will be designed to allow for further upgrades as accelerations in computer hardware, intellectual knowledge and other factors become realized.

With this eye towards the future, the work group organized and distilled past and current activities. From this process, several important new objectives appeared as ‘ready for action’ to enable the long-term vision of SIMon. The work group loosely organized these action items under two themes: a computational theme and an experimental theme. Today, activities in each theme area fall into one of three categories (1) better understanding the capabilities and current progress of available computational tools, (2) using or developing new experimental data to check the assumptions or features of current computational tools, and (3) exploring fundamentally new directions that may yield new insights in later generation models.

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