To demonstrate the feasibility of developing patient-specific computational models for traumatic brain injury research.

Blast Traumatic Brain Injury (bTBI) is a “signature” wound of modern warfare.  In the last two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, blasts were a dominant mechanism of injury and casualty.   bTBI accounts for 38% of service members who died immediately after injury and 53% of those who survived initial injury but died prior to arrival at a military treatment facility. 

Because of the complexity of developing computational models with high realism, simulations to understand the mechanics of blast injury are usually performed on a standardized, single subject; thus, individual differences in susceptibility to blast injury are unknown at this time.   Recent advances in computational tools allow us to create computer models of individual subjects based upon their unique neuroimaging, holding the promise to allow a personalized-medicine approach of understanding and studying traumatic brain injury.

Using the ThermoScientific^TM Amira^TM software package, high-resolution T1/T2/FLAIR MRI sequences were imported, registered, and resampled to create three-dimensional volumetric image sets with equivalent spatial resolutions and voxel sizes.  Then using a combination of automatic selection tools included in Amira^TM along with manual techniques, twelve different biologic materials composing the human head and neck were individually segmented from the imaging data.  Finally, a unique 3D surface was generated for each material and exported into a user-specified file format.

A reproducible and generalizable technique for generating a computational model of the complex head and neck anatomy of a unique human subject was developed.

This proof-of-concept project demonstrates a methodology to generate high-fidelity computational models of individual human head and neck anatomies with standard neuroimaging and commercially-available software.  This methodology can be used in future modeling and simulation applications to study how individual anatomy affects susceptibility to blast injury.