Traumatic brain injuries from blasts and hard hits are a big problem for soldiers, first responders, and athletes. Doctors can see the damage on scans after the fact, but the moment when a fast hit turns into tiny tears deep inside the brain is still hard to capture.
Ricardo Mejia-Alvarez, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State, uses ultra-high-speed cameras and brain look-alikes to see that moment in action. His team builds clear, soft “brains” with realistic folds and places them inside 3D printed skulls. Then they deliver controlled impacts on the outside, similar in strength to a boxing punch, while cameras record what happens inside at tens of thousands of frames per second and sensors track pressure changes.
Those experiments reveal something you cannot see on a CT scan. When the head is struck, pressure in the fluid inside the grooves of the brain can drop so fast that tiny vapor bubbles appear, grow, and then collapse. That bubble activity concentrates strain in exactly the spots where long term damage often shows up.
By tying real world head motions to specific damage patterns, this work can guide better helmet designs, smarter rules for blast and impact exposure, and sharper triage and imaging protocols for people who may look fine on the sidelines or after a blast, but actually are not.
To explore Mejia-Alvarez’s work in more depth, visit:
- Sulcal Cavitation in Linear Head Acceleration: Possible Correlation With Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [Article]
- Understanding Primary Blast Injury: High Frequency Pressure Acutely Disrupts Neuronal Network Dynamics in Cerebral Organoids [Article]
- Localizing Clinical Patterns of Blast Traumatic Brain Injury Through Computational Modeling and Simulation [Article]
- Google Scholar site [Website]
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