**1. Introduction**

94 Injury and Skeletal Biomechanics

J Bone Joint Surg. Br 85-B(3): 380-388

[15] Tidermark J, Ponzer S, Svensson O, Söderqvist A, Törnkvist H (2003) Internal fixation compared with total hip replacement for displaced femoral neck fractures in the elderly.

> Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death in the United States. The brain is among the most essential organs of the human body. From a mechanical stand point, different scenarios where a head comes in contact with a media has evolved a number of integrated protection devices. The scalp and skull, but also to a certain extent the pressurized subarchnoidal space and the dura matter, are the natural protections for the brain. However, these structures are not adapted to the dynamic loading conditions involved in modern road and sports accidents as well as blast injury scenarios. The consequence of this extreme loading is often moderate-to-severe TBI [1-15]. Injuries to the head constitute one of the major causes of death. Brain injury disables or kills someone in the United States every two and half minutes [2]. The annual hospitalization and rehabilitation cost has been estimated to be \$33 billion per year in the US alone [14]. In the United States TBI is a leading cause of death for persons under age 45 [15]. TBI occurs every 15 seconds, see Figure 1. Approximately 5 million Americans currently suffer some form of TBI disability. The leading causes of TBI are motor vehicle accidents, falls, sports injuries and from blast injuries [12]. Thus, preventing these head injuries will not only enhance safety and quality of life but also save healthcare dollars.

> Over the last 40 years, biomechanical research has been gaining attention to fully understand the mechanism of the head injury. Understanding and thus protecting the brain from injury. This can only be achieved by: 1) understanding mechanics of the impact and 2) the biomechanical response of the head to a variety of the loading conditions [2]. A costeffective alternative method using the finite element modeling was used to investigate TBI of human head subject to impact loadings [3].

A brief review of TBI performed below and injury parameters compiled for model validation.

© 2012 Patel and Goswami, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2012 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Figure 2.** Anatomy of the human head [10]

**Figure 3.** Flowchart of TBI injury assessment criteria development

**Figure 1.** Scope of traumatic brain injury in comparison to other modalities [13]
