It's All in the Head

摘要

Skull fracture and brain injury are unfortunately common occurrences. Much work remains to be done to fully understand the injury mechanisms of such types of trauma and how they may best be prevented. Testing on animals or cadavers has obvious practical and ethical difficulties, which has led researchers to use numerical simulation to model the effects of impacts. This necessitates the use of highly accurate models of the biological objects. However, due to the complex nature of biological objects they are typically far more difficult to model than traditional engineering components. The most common method of simulation is Finite Element Analysis. This involves dividing the object into a large number of extremely small simple objects called Finite Elements. The stress and strain on these small elements can be easily analysed, allowing the stress and strain of the overall object to be closely approximated. The difficulty is to develop a method to successfully divide the object into Finite Elements. The divided model is referred to as a mesh and the process of dividing the object is termed meshing. Meshing a typical engineering component is relatively straightforward and many efficient algorithms exist to perform this operation. This is due to the simple geometric nature of most components. Biological objects on the other hand are typically highly irregular and traditional meshing algorithms fail to deal successfully with them. Using traditional meshing techniques can take a matter of years to develop an accurate mesh of a biological object such as the human head.