Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Toward Clinical Use of Computational Brain Biomechanics
Reuben Kraft
Professor of Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
Penn State University
Refreshments served at 10:00 a.m.
Abstract
Instrumented mouthguards can measure head motion during real-world impacts, but they cannot directly tell us what happens to the brain. Computational brain models provide the next step by translating measured head kinematics into estimates of tissue deformation. This seminar presents ongoing work combining instrumented mouthguards and finite element brain modeling to understand the mechanics of brain deformation and evaluate whether these measurements can ultimately contribute to clinical assessment of brain injury.
The first part of the talk examines the fundamental mechanics underlying brain deformation during football head impacts. Brain strain frequently develops two distinct peaks that could be interpreted as coup and contrecoup responses. However, these strain peaks are typically only moderately separated in direction rather than occurring on opposite sides of the brain, and their relationship with simple external kinematic measures is weak. These findings illustrate why head motion alone may be insufficient to characterize the mechanical response of the brain and motivate the use of tissue-level, physics-based measures.
The second part moves from mechanics toward clinical translation. In an ongoing multi-team, multi-sport study, athletes are monitored using instrumented mouthguards and undergo baseline and follow-up cognitive testing following elevated head-impact exposure. Measured impacts are reconstructed using finite element brain simulations to investigate relationships between brain strain, cumulative mechanical exposure, and changes in cognitive performance. The broader goal is to determine whether a sensor-to-simulation pipeline can provide clinically useful information in near real time, ultimately supporting on-field concussion screening and longitudinal monitoring of head-impact exposure.
Bio
Reuben Kraft, Ph.D., is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Penn State University and a co-hire of Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. He is affiliated with the Center for Neural Engineering and the Center for Biodevices. After earning his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, he worked at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory before joining Penn State in 2013. His lab focuses on the mechanics of materials and medicine, high strain rate testing, and computational mechanics, with recent projects focusing on brain and spine biomechanics. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and PECASE, a Fellow of ASME, and founder of BrainSim Technologies, Inc.