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Hypothesis Paper: Mechanism For Primary Blast Induced Traumatic Brain Injury With Minimal Head Motion, Charles F. Babbs

Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering Faculty Working Papers

Transit of the human skull by blast waves produces diffuse brain injury. The exact mechanisms are unknown. This paper describes plausible mechanisms in which steep intracranial pressure gradients, demonstrated in prior computational models of blast-skull interaction, produce subsequent deformation and motion of the whole brain within the skull, without obvious movement of the head. Equations of motion are derived to describe the acceleration, velocity, and relative position of both the skull and the brain in response to known extracranial and intracranial pressures both during and several hundred milliseconds after blast wave passage. A finite element model is solved to visualize …