Prediction of Human Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in Multiple Dimensions

, 2012

Lyndia Wu, Michael Yip, Fidel Hernandez, Joseph Schooler, Kevin Bui, Bradley Hammoor, Erik Ortega, Gregor Yock, Jaime Lopez, Andrew Hoffman, Gerald Grant, David Camarillo

Abstract: Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a global health crisis affecting 6 in 1000 people annually. mTBI causes acute neurocognitive deficits and repeated trauma may lead to chronic neurodegeneration. Current industry safety standards use head acceleration magnitude as an indicator of mTBI. However, injury tolerance has been shown to vary substantially by direction in animal and computational studies, with both the amplitude and duration of head acceleration impulses being important factors. Injury may thus be a multi-dimensional phenomenon that spans multiple spatial and temporal dimensions. Still, this has not yet been shown in humans due to the lack of human injury measurements in all three translational and three rotational directions (six degrees of freedom or 6-DOF).We developed a novel instrumented mouthguard to measure full 6-DOF head motion in American football, boxing, and mixed martial arts. 537 head collisions from 31 subjects were collected, including two cases of mTBI: one subject lost consciousness, while the other experienced less-pronounced symptoms and self-reported the injury.

Wu et al. (2012) Prediction of Human Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in Multiple Dimensions.

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