Sudden violent impact to the head, the kind that can happen in car crashes, football games and other activities, can shear and stretch brain tissue in ways that are very difficult to see.
That’s why USC biomedical engineering assistant professor Ahmed Alshareef is part of a team studying the biomechanics of brain injuries with a goal of understanding exactly what happens dynamically to the brain during concussive events. The project, funded by an NIH grant, could translate into better predictive and diagnostic tools and better measures to prevent and mitigate concussions.
“It starts with understanding how the brain tissue stretches when you get hit in the head —what happens anatomically during the first few seconds of an impact,” says Alshareef, who joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Molinaroli College of Engineering in 2023.
“The hard thing about diagnosing and treating concussion is that you can’t really see the damage with conventional imaging techniques. Imagine holding a bowl of gelatin, then jerking it side to side and seeing the layers stretching or shearing past each other. That’s very close to what happens in the brain, which, like gelatin, is a very soft material that’s prone to what we call rotational motion.”
Alshareef’s team, which includes scientists at the University of Virginia and Uniformed Services University, is using two novel imaging techniques to better visualize the moment of brain injury.
The first involves embedding sensors in the brain tissue of medically donated cadavers to measure brain tissue movement during sudden impact.
“I’ve always been interested in the brain in general and in terms of what we as engineers can do to understand injury causation and design better tools that translate to the real world to prevent injury.”
A second technique places subjects inside MRI scanners and tracking the motion of the brain while repeating a non-injurious rotational motion many times. The resulting video generated by sequencing together the MRI images can provide a three-dimensional view of how the brain is moving inside the head, Alshareef says.
“We’re primarily in the fields of concussion prediction and prevention. In terms of prediction, we’re creating computational models with the data we gather that will be used to digitally recreate impacts that happen in the real world and use the simulations to predict the extent of injury,” Alshareef says.
“The other aspect of this is to use those predictive modeling tools and data to design better helmets and airbags, for example, to prevent and mitigate these types of concussions in the first place.”
Alshareef, who grew up in Columbia, had initially set his sights on medical school, but one of his undergraduate research experiences in injury biomechanics got him interested in studying the brain instead.
“I’ve always been interested in the brain in general and in terms of what we as engineers can do to understand injury causation and design better tools that translate to the real world to prevent injury.”