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Register a new userSkull Flexure from Blast Waves: A Mechanism for Brain Injury with Implications for Helmet Design
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Traumatic brain injury [TBI] has become a signature injury of current military conflicts, with debilitating, costly, and long-lasting effects. Although mechanisms by which head impacts cause TBI have been well-researched, the mechanisms by which blasts cause TBI are not understood. From numerical hydrodynamic simulations, we have discovered that non-lethal blasts can induce sufficient skull flexure to generate potentially damaging loads in the brain, even without a head impact. The possibility that this mechanism may contribute to TBI has implications for injury diagnosis and armor design.
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This paper presents an analytical design of an ultrasonic power transfer system based on piezoelectric micro-machined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT) for fully wireless brain implants in mice. The key steps like the material selection of each layer and the top electrode radius to maximize the coupling factor are well-detailed. This approach results in the design of a single cell with a high effective coupling coefficient. Furthermore, compact models are used to make the design process less time-consuming for designers. These models are based on the equivalent circuit theory for the PMUT. A cell of 107 um in radius, 5 um in thickness of Lead Zirconate Titanium (PZT), and 10 um in thickness of silicon (Si) is found to have a 4% of effective coupling coefficient among the highest values for a clamped edge boundary conditions. Simulation results show a frequency of 2.84 MHz as resonance. In case of an array, mutual impedance and numerical modeling are used to estimate the distance between the adjacent cells. In addition, the area of the proposed transducer and the number of cells are computed with the Rayleigh distance and neglecting the cross-talk among cells, respectively. The designed transducer consists of 7x7 cells in an area of 3.24 mm2. The transducer is able to deliver an acoustic intensity of 7.185 mW/mm2 for a voltage of 19.5 V for powering brain implants seated in the motor cortex and striatum of the mices brain. The maximum acoustic intensity occurs at a distance of 2.5 mm in the near field which was estimated with the Rayleigh length equation.
Dementia disorders are increasingly becoming sources of a broad range of problems, strongly interfering with normal daily tasks of a growing number of individuals. Such neurodegenerative diseases are often accompanied with progressive brain atrophy that, at late stages, leads to drastically reduced brain dimensions. At the moment, this structural involution can be followed with XCT or MRI measurements that share numerous disadvantages in terms of usability, invasiveness and costs. In this work, we aim to retrieve information concerning the brain atrophy stage and its evolution, proposing a novel approach based on non-invasive time-resolved Near Infra-Red (tr-NIR) measurements. For this purpose, we created a set of human-head atlases, in which we eroded the brain as it would happen in a clinical brain-atrophy progression. With these realistic meshes, we reproduced a longitudinal tr-NIR study exploiting a Monte-Carlo photon propagation algorithm to model the varying cerebral spinal fluid (CSF). The study of the time-resolved reflectance curve at late photon arrival times exhibited peculiar slope-changes upon CSF layer increase that were confirmed under several measurement conditions. The performance of the technique suggests good sensitivity to CSF variation, useful for a fast and non-invasive observation of the dementia progression.
Ultrasound waves propagating in water or soft biological tissue are strongly reflected when encountering the skull, which limits the use of ultrasound-based techniques in transcranial imaging and therapeutic applications. Current knowledge on the acoustic properties of the cranial bone is restricted to far-field observations, leaving its near-field properties unexplored. We report on the existence of skull-guided acoustic waves, which was herein confirmed by near-field measurements of optoacoustically-induced responses in ex-vivo murine skulls immersed in water. Dispersion of the guided waves was found to reasonably agree with the prediction of a multilayered flat plate model. It is generally anticipated that our findings may facilitate and broaden the application of ultrasound-mediated techniques in brain diagnostics and therapy.
Physical head phantoms allow assessing source reconstruction procedures in electroencephalography and electrical stimulation profiles during transcranial electric stimulation. Volume conduction in the head is strongly influenced by the skull representing the main conductivity barrier. Realistic modeling of its characteristics is thus important for phantom development. In the present study, we proposed plastic clay as a material for modeling the skull in phantoms. We analyzed five clay types varying in granularity and fractions of fireclay, each with firing temperatures from 550 {deg}C to 950 {deg}C. We investigated the conductivity of standardized clay samples when immersed in a 0.9% sodium chloride solution with time-resolved four-point impedance measurements. To test the reusability of the clay model, these measurements were repeated after cleaning the samples by rinsing in deionized water for 5 h. We found time-dependent impedance changes for approximately 5 min after immersion in the solution. Thereafter, the conductivities stabilized between 0.0716 S/m and 0.0224 S/m depending on clay type and firing temperatures. The reproducibility of the measurement results proved the effectiveness of the rinsing procedure. Clay provides formability, is permeable for ions, can be adjusted in conductivity value and is thus suitable for the skull modeling in phantoms.
Relativistic blast waves can be described by a mechanical model. In this model, the blast -- the compressed gas between the forward and reverse shocks -- is viewed as one hot body. Equations governing its dynamics are derived from conservation of mass, energy, and momentum. Simple analytical solutions are obtained in the two limiting cases of ultra-relativistic and non-relativistic reverse shock. Equations are derived for the general explosion problem.
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