Explore the vast range of titles available.

Periventricular injury is frequently noted as one aspect of severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and the presence of the ventricles has been hypothesized to be a primary pathogenesis associated with the prevalence of periventricular injury in patients with TBI. Although substantial endeavors have been made to elucidate the potential mechanism, a thorough explanation for this hypothesis appears lacking. In this study, a three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model of the human head with an accurate representation of the cerebral ventricles is developed accounting for the fluid properties of the intraventricular cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) as well as its interaction with the brain. An additional model is developed by replacing the intraventricular CSF with a substitute with brain material. Both models are subjected to rotational accelerations with magnitudes suspected to induce severe diffuse axonal injury. The results reveal that the presence of the ventricles leads to increased strain in the periventricular region, providing a plausible explanation for the vulnerability of the periventricular region. In addition, the strain-exacerbation effect associated with the presence of the ventricles is also noted in the paraventricular region, although less pronounced than that in the periventricular region. The current study advances the understanding of the periventricular injury mechanism as well as the detrimental effects that the ventricles exert on the periventricular and paraventricular brain tissue.

Hippocampal injury is common in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients, but the underlying pathogenesis remains elusive. In this study, we hypothesize that the presence of the adjacent fluid-containing temporal horn exacerbates the biomechanical vulnerability of the hippocampus. Two finite element models of the human head were used to investigate this hypothesis, one with and one without the temporal horn, and both including a detailed hippocampal subfield delineation. A fluid-structure interaction coupling approach was used to simulate the brain-ventricle interface, in which the intraventricular cerebrospinal fluid was represented by an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian multi-material formation to account for its fluid behavior. By comparing the response of these two models under identical loadings, the model that included the temporal horn predicted increased magnitudes of strain and strain rate in the hippocampus with respect to its counterpart without the temporal horn. This specifically affected cornu ammonis (CA) 1 (CA1), CA2/3, hippocampal tail, subiculum, and the adjacent amygdala and ventral diencephalon. These computational results suggest that the presence of the temporal horn exacerbate the vulnerability of the hippocampus, highlighting the mechanobiological dependency of the hippocampus on the temporal horn.