Chapter 2.Biomechanical Forces Involved in Brain Injury

The biomechanics of brain injury are complicated by functional disturbances that do not manifest as gross pathologies. The forces required to injure bones and other organs are often studied by reproducing them in cadavers, which have limited use in studying brain injury because brain function cannot be assessed in this context. A combination of cadaver research, human surrogates, and volunteer data has been used to further the understanding of brain injury biomechanics. Although each experimental approach has its own limitations, comparing findings from different approaches can provide reasonable estimates of the kinematics associated with injury. Determining the human tolerance to brain injuries of different severities is essential for developing automotive and protective equipment safety standards. These standards, along with relative performance evaluation of protective design, help to reduce the incidence of brain injuries. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the relevant history of brain injury biomechanics research as well as some recent advances that have been made with volunteer data from instrumented athletes. The applications of this work are summarized, and areas of future research are discussed.