Validating a traumatic brain injury finite element model (FEM) is often limited by a lack of extensive animal data, that may be used to examine the conditions under which the model is accurate. Given that most published reports specify only general descriptions of injury, this study examined potential evaluation strategies and assessed the ability of a FEM to simulate the general descriptions of injury in an animal model. The results of the study showed that: (1) the results from a simplified FEM could estimate trends that were similar to the injury patterns observed in a set of animal experiments; (2) a parameter (Z parameter), which quantified the comparison process between computational and animal data, estimated trends that would help in the model evaluation process; and (3) that a more complete evaluation process would occur if multiple testing methods were included in the evaluation procedure. (A)
Abstract