Abstract
Although concussion is one of the greatest health challenges today, our physical understanding of the cause of injury is limited. In this Letter, we simulated football head impacts in a finite element model and extracted the most dominant modal behavior of the brain’s deformation. We showed that the brain’s deformation is most sensitive in low frequency regimes close to 30 Hz, and discovered that for most subconcussive head impacts, the dynamics of brain deformation is dominated by a single global mode. In this Letter, we show the existence of localized modes and multimodal behavior in the brain as a hyperviscoelastic medium. This dynamical phenomenon leads to strain concentration patterns, particularly in deep brain regions, which is consistent with reported concussion pathology.
- Received 24 October 2016
- Revised 26 October 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.138101
© 2018 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Viewpoint
Brain Motion Under Impact
Published 30 March 2018
A numerical study suggests that head impacts primarily induce a few low-frequency, damped modes of vibration in brain tissue, a finding that could inform the design of sports helmets.
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