Citation

Lee KYK, Nyein MK, Moore DF, Joannopoulos JD, Socrate S, Imholt T, Radovitzky R, Johnson SG. Neuroimage 2011; 54(Suppl 1): S30-S36.

Affiliation

Department of Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.05.042

PMID

20547228

Abstract

In this paper, we show that bone piezoelectricity-a phenomenon in which bone polarizes electrically in response to an applied mechanical stress and produces a short-range electric field-may be a source of intense blast-induced electric fields in the brain, with magnitudes and timescales comparable to fields with known neurological effects. We compute the induced charge density in the skull from stress data on the skull from a finite-element full-headmodel simulation of a typical IED-scale blast wave incident on an unhelmeted human head as well as a human head protected by a kevlar helmet, and estimate the resulting electric fields in the brain in both cases to be on the order of 10V/m in millisecond pulses. These fields are more than 10 times stronger than the IEEE safety guidelines for controlled environments 1. and comparable in strength and timescale to fields from repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulaton (rTMS) that are designed to induce neurological effects 2. They can be easily measured by RF antennas, and may provide the means to design a diagnostic tool that records a quantative measure of the head's exposure to blast insult.

Language: en