Engineer helping unravel mystery of traumatic brain injury

The American Academy of Neurology issued new guidelines last week for assessing school-aged athletes with head injuries on the field. The message: if in doubt, sit out.

With more than 3 million sports-related concussions occurring in the U.S. each year, from school children to professional athletes, the issue is a burgeoning health crisis.

While concussions may not be difficult to diagnose initially, the longer one waits, the more difficult treatment can be.

The efforts of a researcher and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Engineering & Applied Science are helping to unravel the many mysteries of traumatic brain injury.

“There’s and urgent need to understand the problem of traumatic brain injuries, for the sake of athletes, military personnel and accident victims,” says Philip Bayly, PhD, the Lilyan and E. Lisle Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

“Anyone who has met someone who’s had a head injury knows how scary it is, and how frustrating it is that we know so little about the causal pathways, and thus the best therapeutic opportunities,” he says.

Bayly, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, researches the mechanics of brain injury. He recently received a $2.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to better understand traumatic brain injuries.

Head injuries, concussions and the resulting trauma have been in public discussion recently as the National Football League (NFL) deals with a lawsuit regarding head injuries by about one-third of living former NFL players. The league is accused of not providing information connecting football-related head injuries to brain damage, memory loss and other long-term health issues.

Bayly’s team is working on ways to measure 3-D relative motion between in the brain and skull and estimate strain during mild head acceleration. Bayly hopes computer simulation can teach researchers about the basic physics of brain injury and ways to develop new approaches to prevention and therapy.

“Our studies provide experimental data on how the brain actually responds mechanically in response to mild external loads,” Bayly says. “This is especially critical to developing useful computer simulations, to make sure they reflect reality.
These simulations will in turn be used to design new equipment, evaluate rule changes in sports and determine exposure thresholds or diagnostic tests.”

Computer simulation is important in creating animal models that can be used to develop diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, he says.

“Understanding mechanical deformation in traumatic brain injury is also essential to anyone studying brain trauma by exposing cultured brain cells to mechanical stress,” Bayly says. “We need to understand how much stress to apply and in what directions.”

How can athletes minimize their risks?

“From a mechanical standpoint, they should avoid repeated high head accelerations,” Bayly says. “Head-to-head collisions and collisions with head-to-ground are clearly to be avoided.”

Bayly says to truly protect athletes, new rules need to be instated.

“I would actually advocate for eliminating sports like boxing, in which injury-level accelerations are known to occur routinely. More research is needed on sports where the threshold is less clear.”

There is where Bayly and his colleagues come in.

“We need to do the research to find out what kinds of repeated accelerations are responsible for producing the degeneration seen in chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” he says.

(Image: Jupiterimages / Getty Images)

FOOTBALL teams of the future — even high school squads on limited budgets — may someday have a new tool to check players for brain injuries. It’s a special form of headgear, packed with sensors that read the brain waves of athletes after they come off the field, thus detecting changes caused by the trauma of hard knocks.

The compact, portable sensors decipher neural activity by measuring changes in the brain’s tiny magnetic field. These small magnetometers — still in the laboratory and in prototype — have yet to be tried on athletes. But their potential is enormous for brain imaging and for inexpensive monitoring of brain diseases, as well as for many other applications like the control of prosthetics, said Dr. José Luis Contreras-Vidal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston.

A Mathematical View of Track and Field World Records

A mathematician has developed a new model that can estimate which track and field world records are the most likely to be broken.

Brian Godsey, a graduate student in mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, recently published a paper including computations of the likelihood of record-setting performances in 48 different men’s and women’s track and field events during this calendar year.

Godsey’s paper did not directly address the likelihood of an athlete setting a track and field world record at the 2012 London Olympics, but his analysis suggests that viewers should keep a close watch on the men’s 110-meter hurdles and three women’s events, the 5,000-meter and 3000-meter steeplechase races, as wells as the hammer throw. There is a 95 percent chance that the women’s steeplechase record will be broken this year, Godsey wrote in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.