Biomechanics of mild traumatic brain injury

This study created a novel strategy to assist emergency healthcare professionals to utilize the vehicle crash data for their daily identification of mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI). An instrument was designed for paramedics collecting the crash data on-scene. An online biomechanical expert system was developed to quantify the risk factors of crash data and to stratify the risk levels of patients. In a usage scenario, the paramedics could collect the biomechanical crash data on-scene and deliver the data to the emergency department; then, an emergency healthcare staff could place the crash data online and complete an immediate assessment of the risk level of the patient. The risk level could be used to assist the attending emergency physician decide a proper referral pattern of the patient for clinical MTBI diagnosis. The feasibility study of the data collection on-scene demonstrated that pre-hospital emergency personnel could collect the injury mechanism data without affecting their normal duties. Testing the online system showed that the overall system performance satisfies the requirements of emergency use.;Furthermore, a novel methodology, Crash Investigation-Simulation-Correlation (CISC), was proposed to cope with the difficulties of studying the biomechanics of MTBI. The statistical part of CISC methodology was validated using the National Football League-Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (NFL-MTBI) study data. The validation demonstrated that the proposed methodology not only confirmed the conclusions drawn in the NFL-MTBI study, but it also offered several advantages over historical approaches in injury biomechanics study by thoroughly investigating biomechanical parameters and their roles in injury causation, identifying the prime biomechanical parameters and quantifying their contributions, updating injury thresholds, developing new biomechanical model(s), and furthering our understanding of the biomechanics of MTBI.