| Description |
Thresholds for primary vascular injury have not been well-defi ned. Various animal experimental models are available to study di fferent types of injury and their severity, but quantifying the tissue deformations that produce the injuries is difficult. This project aims at developing a fi nite element (FE) model of controlled cortical impact (CCI) in a mouse in order to quantify brain deformations associated with the resulting contusion. The predicted deformations will be used to study the correlation between the mechanical responses and the experimental injuries. The model for this study was built by digitizing coronal section images of a mouse brain taken from an online database. The resulting model includes a total of 426,447 brick and shell elements to represent the brain, skull, impactor and the meninges. A contact algorithm was used to model interactions between the mouse brain and the impactor. Impact velocity and depth were governed by a prescribed displacement with respect to time for the impactor. The in uence of these loading conditions, along with that of impactor size and shape and craniotomy size, were examined. The signi cance of mesh density, element integration schemes and contact algorithm was also examined. Not surprisingly, predicted peak mechanical responses in all the parameter studies conducted were localized in and around the region of the impact. Impactor shape and impact depth were the leading factors in uencing the mechanical responses. |
