Toward a Unified Multiscale Computational Model of the Human Body's Immediate Responses to Blast-Related Trauma: A Review of the Scientific Literature

Abstract

A Review of the Scientific Literature I n the early 2000s, during the first several years of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) accounted for a growing proportion of U.S. combat casualties and blast-related injuries. As incidence rates quickly rose, further research into the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of blast-related injury was needed to identify those in need of care, how to determine their level of impairment, and the efficacy of various treatments and rehabilitation methods (Tanielian and Jaycox, 2008). Advancements in boundary conditions, material properties, the computational modeling of shock tubes that replicate blast waves, the use of animal models and cadavers for data, and validation have all contributed to enhance research about the human body's responses to blast exposure.Developing comprehensive blast-related injury mechanisms remains an active area of research and exploration. Computational modeling has investigated some of the human body's responses to blast-induced injuries in various body parts, from the cellular level to the tissue system level. Such modeling grants researchers the ability to assess the vulnerability of organs exposed to blast and correlations with clinically measurable injury levels. However, despite significant progress, there are several important factors that remain difficult to measure directly in real time, including the fluid mechanics of the human body (especially the brain), electrochemical and electromechanical components, and the brain's mechanobiology, such as intracranial pressure (ICP), deformations, stretch, shear stress, shear strain, and maximum principal strain (MPS).It is also important to note that, as critical as computational models highly focused on one body part or tissue system are to deepening our understanding, it is infrequent that service mem-