AI offers 'paradigm shift' in study of brain injury

From the gridiron to the battlefield, the study of traumatic brain injury has exploded in recent years. Crucial to understanding brain injury is the ability to model the mechanical forces that compress, stretch, and twist the brain tissue and causing damage that ranges from fleeting to fatal. Models discovered by the Constitutive Artificial Neural Network outperform existing models for brain tissue. Researchers at Stanford University now say they have tapped artificial intelligence to produce a profoundly more accurate model of how deformations translate into stresses in the brain and believe that their approach could reveal a more definitive understanding of when and why concussion sometimes leads to lasting brain damage, and other times not. "The problem in brain modeling to date is that the brain is not a homogeneous tissue – it's not the same in every part of the brain. Yet, trauma is often pervasive," said Ellen Kuhl, professor of mechanical engineering, director of the Living Matter Lab, and senior author of a new study appearing in the journal, Acta Biomaterialia.