Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

"The research outlined in this proposal is expected to yield substantial knowledge related to understanding, assessing and treatment of Blast-Induced Traumatic Brain Injury (BI-TBI) cases. This knowledge will be translated into a Decision Support System (DSS) to be used by healthcare providers for immediate intervention as well as short-term resource management and for long-term treatment BI-TBI patients. The development of the DSS is based on the results of numerical models validated through different levels of experiments under simulated blast load conditions. The numerical tasks will focus on correlating the frequency contents of different sub-lethal explosion scenarios to natural (resonance) frequencies of different parts of the brain using high resolution finite element models. The tasks will also identify critical brain regions that are most susceptible to damage by different blast shock wave levels and frequency content. Isolating such critical brain areas will facilitate the quantification of the mechanical strain and strain rate levels developed within different brain areas under different explosion scenarios. The experimental tasks will include testing of physical skull/brain models under a wide range of blast shock wave parameters. This will facilitate visualising of blast wave propagation and reflection processes in the brain. These experiments will also be used to validate the results of the numerical models. The experiments will also include testing animal models under different levels of sub-lethal combination of blast pressure and impulse. In addition, this project will evaluate the cellular response of neuron cells in culture to different strain and strain rate levels (obtained from the numerical and physical head models) to generate injury threshold relationships. Integration of the data generated through the different research tasks in the form of a DSS software tool and identification of the different injury levels in terms of expected acute and chronic neurological outcomes are the ultimate goals of this project. Meeting these objectives will ensure quality of life to Canadians who may be victims of possible BI-TBI. The proposed research program, with the support from NSERC and CIHR, will make significant strides in the BI-TBI research areas, resulting in optimized clinical resource management, immediate and effective medical intervention and improved long-term management of Canadians who may become victims of BI-TBI."