Six degree-of-freedom measurements of human mild traumatic brain injury

Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 2015

Fidel Hernandez, Lyndia C Wu, Michael C Yip, Kaveh Laksari, Andrew R Hoffman, Jaime R Lopez, Gerald A Grant, Svein Kleiven, David B Camarillo

Publisher Link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10439-014-1212-4

Abstract: This preliminary study investigated whether direct measurement of head rotation improves prediction of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Although many studies have implicated rotation as a primary cause of mTBI, regulatory safety standards use 3 degree-of-freedom (3DOF) translation-only kinematic criteria to predict injury. Direct 6DOF measurements of human head rotation (3DOF) and translation (3DOF) have not been previously available to examine whether additional DOFs improve injury prediction. We measured head impacts in American football, boxing, and mixed martial arts using 6DOF instrumented mouthguards, and predicted clinician-diagnosed injury using 12 existing kinematic criteria and 6 existing brain finite element (FE) criteria. Among 513 measured impacts were the first two 6DOF measurements of clinically diagnosed mTBI. For this dataset, 6DOF criteria were the most predictive of …

Hernandez et al. (2015) Six degree-of-freedom measurements of human mild traumatic brain injury, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, vol. 43, pp. 1918-1934.