Originally published January 9 2006
Brain study creates pictures of how injuries occur inside the skull
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Mechanical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have made movies with MRI technology that show how brains move inside the skull and how these movements can lead to neurotrauma.
It's a scene football fans will see over and over during the bowl and NFL playoff seasons: a player, often the quarterback, being slammed to the ground and hitting the back of his head on the landing.
Researchers and doctors long have relied upon crude approximations made from test dummy crashes or mathematical models that infer - rather loosely - what happens to the brain during traumatic brain injury or concussion.
But the truth is that the state of the art in understanding brain deformation after impact is rather crude and uncertain because such methods don't give any true picture of what happens.
Now, mechanical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis and collaborators have devised a technique on humans that for the first time shows just what the brain does when the skull accelerates.
What they've done is use a technique originally developed to measure cardiac deformation to image deformation in human subjects during repeated mild head decelerations.
The researchers have mimicked that very motion with humans on a far milder, gentler, smaller scale and captured the movement inside the brain by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Philip Bayly, Ph.D., Lilyan and E. Lisle Hughes Professor in Engineering, Guy Genin, Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Eric Leuthardt, MD, a Washington University neurosurgeon, tested seven subjects in an MRI and gathered data that show that the brain, connected to the skull by numerous vessels, membranes and nerves at the base, tries to pull away from all those attachments, leading to a significant deformation of the front of the brain.
According to Genin, the subjects are placed in the soft netting of a head guide, and are asked to raise and lower their heads about an inch inside an MRI machine.
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