The role of primary blast in blast-induced TBI is controversial. The identification of well documented clinical cases is difficult and rare, while the technical difficulties associated with simulating primary blast in the laboratory are considerable, resulting in an inconsistent literature that is difficult to interpret. This laboratory initiated a multidisciplinary effort in order to understan...

BACKGROUND Blast-related traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common cause of injury in the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. How the primary blast wave affects the brain is not well understood. The aim of the present study was to examine whether blast exposure affects the cerebral vasculature in a rodent model. We analyzed the brains of rats exposed to single or multiple (three) 74.5 k...

The intensity and type of trauma inflicted on a bod y by blast overpr essure are related to man y facto rs. Among them, body orientation. In order to study the effect of body orientation, detailed models of 2D horizontal slices of human and sh eep thoraces have been developed and va lidated with the limited data available in the open literature. The main goal o f this stud y is to verify if the...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is deemed the "signature injury" of recent military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, largely because of increased blast exposure. Injuries to the brain can often be misdiagnosed, leading to further complications in the future. Therefore, the use of protein biomarkers for the screening and diagnosis of TBI is urgently needed. In the present study, we have investiga...

Over the past several years, we have noticed an increase in the number of blast injury studies published in peer-reviewed biomedical journals that have utilized improperly conceived experiments. Data from these studies will lead to false conclusions and more confusion than advancement in the understanding of blast injury, particularly blast neurotrauma. Computational methods to properly charact...

We present self consistent calculations of Synchrotron self Compton (SSC) radiation that takes place within the afterglow blast wave and External inverse Compton (EIC) radiation that takes place when flare photons (produced by an internal process) pass through the blast wave. We show that if our current interpretations of the Swift XRT data are correct, there should be a canonical high energy a...

We calculate the very high energy (sub-GeV to TeV) inverse Compton emission of GRB afterglows. We argue that this emission provides a powerful test of the currently accepted afterglow model. We focus on two processes: synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission within the afterglow blast wave, and external inverse Compton (EIC) emission which occurs when flare photons (produced by an internal proce...

OBJECTIVES Recent military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the wartime effect of traumatic brain injury (TBI). The reason for the prominence of TBI in these particular conflicts as opposed to others is unclear but may result from the increased survivability of blast due to improvements in body armor. In the military context blunt, ballistic and blast effects may all contribut...

Most models for blazars and gamma-ray bursts involve relativistic plasma outflows powered by accretion processes onto black holes. The blast wave physics developed for cosmological models of GRBs is reviewed. Two points relevant for blazar modeling are made: (1) The injection of nonthermal relativistic particles in the comoving frame is simply treated though a process of energizing the plasma a...

The paper is concerned with the development and evaluation of a fast, accurate, and versatile method of simulating blast wave propagation within complex built environments. Existing methods of modelling the propagation of a blast wave each fail in at least one of the speed, accuracy or versatility requirements. Conventional simulation, for example, typically takes several days to complete a sin...