Date of Completion

Spring 5-1-2023

Thesis Advisor(s)

Kazunori Hoshino; Patrick Kumavor

Honors Major

Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are caused by acute impacts, repeated impacts, or traumatic jostling of the head. TBIs can result in a variety of physical and mental symptoms including acute and long-term effects. TBIs have been a large area of research, however, animal models for studying traumatic brain injury are limited by high variability and confined to tissue studies on a macro scale. An in vitro model for traumatic brain injury application and high-speed visualization is optimized in this paper to resemble in vivo conditions for short- and long-term cellular studies. This in vitro system consists of a force applicator which can impact a hydrogel neuron culture, and high-speed images are taken to visualize damage. We improved on the system in several ways. We initially tested the system capabilities to characterize the possible force outputs with different system configurations. We created new attachments like a dampener and modifications to slow the impacts for better visualization and deformation tracking. From our initial prototyping and data, we determined the optimal system configurations to simulate a traumatic brain injury. Further testing was performed with the final prototype to determine the strain rate and acceleration of impact which are important factors for TBIs. Our data shows that there is at least one configuration that can produce the conditions to cause a TBI. This design was used with phantom neuron material but can now be applied to neuron cultures with known experimental parameters.

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