Biomedical sciences instrumentation
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Facial bone fractures in the military can result from direct loading of night vision goggles on the orbital region. Facial fracture research has shown that increasing the area over which the load is applied increases the load tolerance. The purpose of this study is to apply this concept to reducing the risk of facial bone fracture from night vision goggle impacts. ⋯ Two impacts to the male subject with a custom face shield resulted in peak loads of 4554 N and 5101 N with no injury. The final impact to the male subject had a peak load of 2010 N with complete orbital fracture due to the absence of a countermeasure. From these tests it is shown that facial fracture risk from night vision goggle impact can be reduced using a contoured rigid face shield.
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Commonly considered a continuum of injuries, diffuse brain injury (DBI) ranges from mild concussion to severe diffuse axonal injury. The lower end of the spectrum is generally referred to as mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI). More severe forms of DBI have garnered extensive experimentation while these milder cases are considerably less explored. ⋯ Prior experimentation estimated an angular acceleration of approximately 350 krad/s2 is necessary for the induction of mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) in the rodent. To induce these magnitudes of angular acceleration in a repeatable manner, the impacting interface must be critically analyzed. This investigation uses a mathematical model based on parameters of a previously developed experimental model to assess the impacting interface such that angular accelerations are sufficient to produce MTBI in the rodent.
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Human modelling is an interdisciplinary research field. The topic, emotion-affected decision making, was originally a cognitive psychology issue, but is now recognized as an important research direction for both computer science and biomedical modelling. ⋯ The work is based on Ortony's theory of emotions and bounded rationality theory, and attempts to connect the emotion process with decision making. A computational emotion model is proposed, and the initial framework of this model in virtual human simulation within the platform of Virtools is presented.
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Comparative Study Controlled Clinical Trial
Thoracic and lumbar spine accelerations in everyday activities.
The purpose of this study was to quantify thoracic and lumbar spine accelerations for men and women of different body sizes during daily activities. Measured spine accelerations were compared to determine if there were significant differences in peak accelerations based on gender, size, and spine location. ⋯ Based on the statistical analysis, it was determined that gender and body size did not have a significant effect on peak accelerations of the thoracic and lumbar spine. The findings from the present study are of great value to researchers in order to understand the acceleration patterns of the human body during low impact accelerations.
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Previous research has developed a pneumatically driven device for delivering a controlled mechanical insult to cultured neurons. The neuronal cell culture was injured by applying a transient air pulse to a culture well fitted with a highly elastic Silastic culture well bottom. ⋯ The simulation results, using a finite element model of the culture well membrane, compared well with the results from the original experiments. When peak air pressure was varied from 69 kPa to 345 kPa (10 to 50 psig), numerical simulations showed that the corresponding membrane strains varied from 20 to 95% and the stress response varied from 0.5 to 1.2 MPa.