Development and validation of an advanced anisotropic visco-hyperelastic human brain FE model.

Abstract

This paper proposes the implementation of fractional anisotropy and axonal fiber orientation from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of 12 healthy patients into an existing human FE head model to develop a more realistic brain model with advanced constitutive laws. Further, the brain behavior was validated in terms of brain strain against experimental data published by Hardy et al. (2001, 2007) and for brain pressure against Nahum et al. (1977) experimental impacts. A reasonable agreement was observed between the simulation and experimental data. Results showed the feasibility of integrating axonal direction information into FE analysis and established the context of computation of axonal elongation in case of head trauma.