Case Study: Wayne State University achieves concussion injury-threshold development with Altair HyperMesh

Developing an Injury Threshold for Human Brain Concussion

Wayne State University’s Bioengineering Center, led by Dr. King H. Yang, sought to better understand mild traumatic brain injury (concussion) mechanisms and develop an injury threshold to prevent or mitigate MTBI in sports and crashes. To do this the team needed high-fidelity finite element head models and tools to link real-world impact kinematics to tissue-level brain responses; they turned to Altair’s HyperMesh modeling and morphing tools as their simulation platform.

Using Altair HyperMesh as the exclusive meshing and modeling environment for the Wayne State University Head Injury Model (WSUHIM), researchers ran FE simulations driven by reconstructed on-field impact kinematics and 24 laboratory reconstructions to predict intracranial pressure and localized shear stress. The study found intracranial pressure as a global MTBI indicator and shear stress in the upper brainstem/thalamus as the best predictor, showed translational acceleration drives pressure responses more than rotation, and proposed a kinematics-based injury tolerance for football and other activities—demonstrating Altair’s tools enabled measurable advances in defining injury criteria and informing better protective headgear.

Wayne State University

King-Hay Yang

Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of the Bioengineering Center