Injuries to the brain are hard to assess, particularly just after a traumatic event. Various imaging techniques can help to assess how the brain has been impacted, but they are still not very good in many cases, leaving physicians with not enough data to form confident diagnoses.
Researchers at Penn State are working on a 21st century approach, combining a virtual model of a human brain with body-worn sensors to simulate actual impacts inside a computer and predict their outcomes. The idea is that one day athletes will be able to wear one or more sensors on the body and when these sensors detect an impact, their data about the impact, such as direction and velocity, are then used to recreate the impact on the virtual model of the brain. Seeing what happens inside the simulation may be like a window into the real brain being simulated.
Here’s a video with one of the project leads describing the research:
Via: Penn State…