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Spinal Cord Boundary Conditions Affect Brain Tissue Strains in Impact Simulations

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Abstract

Brain and spinal cord injuries have devastating consequences on quality of life but are challenging to assess experimentally due to the traumatic nature of such injuries. Finite element human body models (HBM) have been developed to investigate injury but are limited by a lack of biofidelic spinal cord implementation. In many HBM, brain models terminate with a fixed boundary condition at the brain stem. The goals of this study were to implement a comprehensive representation of the spinal cord into a contemporary head and neck HBM, and quantify the effect of the spinal cord on brain deformation during simulated impacts. Spinal cord tissue geometries were developed, based on 3D medical imaging and literature data, meshed, and implemented into the GHBMC 50th percentile male model. The model was evaluated in frontal, lateral, rear, and oblique impact conditions, and the resulting maximum principal strains in the brain tissue were compared, with and without the spinal cord. A new cumulative strain curve metric was proposed to quantify brain strain distribution. Presence of the spinal cord increased brain tissue strains in all simulated cases, owing to a more compliant boundary condition, highlighting the importance of the spinal cord to assess brain response during impact.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Stellantis Canada, General Motors of Canada, Honda Development and Manufacturing of America, and the Global Human Body Models Consortium; and Compute Canada for the computational resources needed to undertake the research.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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  1. Department of Mechanical & Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Aleksander Rycman, Stewart D. McLachlin & Duane S. Cronin

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Correspondence to Duane S. Cronin.

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Rycman, A., McLachlin, S.D. & Cronin, D.S. Spinal Cord Boundary Conditions Affect Brain Tissue Strains in Impact Simulations. Ann Biomed Eng 51, 783–793 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-022-03089-7

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