Vanderbilt researchers are using BIHF — a Biofidelic Instrumented Head Form — to study the impact of blast exposures in the military, an idea that could translate to research in other areas, including contact sports such as football and hockey.
Soldiers often come away from routine training exercises with symptoms the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports as a mild traumatic brain injury — balance problems, forgetfulness, blurred vision and hearing challenges.
The military was interested in finding ways to reduce impact on the brain by developing strategies that could be employed during training exercises. This need, together with other needs of U.S. Army soldiers, led to the development of an educational partnership agreement, according to Tonia Rex, PhD, professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences and a member of the Faculty Advisory and Leadership Council of the Vanderbilt University Institute of National Security.
The program, known as Pathfinder, is a collaboration of the U.S. Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory and the Civil-Military Innovation Institute, designed to partner soldiers with academic researchers to promote tactical innovation. This effort includes the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Vanderbilt faculty. The Vanderbilt collaboration, one of the first such Pathfinder collaborations in the country, utilizes both neuroscience and engineering to understand the blast environment and potential health effects on the brain.
“We know blunt force impacts — think about football, hockey and other impact sports — can be damaging to the brain. There have been new helmet designs to help protect those athletes, but we don’t have that for blast exposures,” said Rex, research director and vice chair for Basic and Translational Research at the Vanderbilt Eye Institute.
“The military was concerned about their (service members’) brain health from weapons firing, so this would be percussive kinds of forces … repeat low level blast environments,” said Rex, who holds the Marlene and Spencer Hays Directorship in Translational Research.
An initial challenge for the research was to create a way to understand the effects of blasts on the brain and a way to test helmets to see how well they were doing at preventing those blast forces from getting into the brain.
BIHF was created to have similar force response characteristics as an actual human head and brain, with sensors placed through the eye and optic nerve and in the brain to measure changes as they occur.
“The challenging thing with this cohort is that the individuals who enter special operations were in the military already so none of them are truly naïve,” Rex said. “So, all we could do is get kind of a resting state, 48 hours or more of rest, from them and then a post-training exercise, which would be within 24 hours of training.
Rex and her team used several types of assessments to detect the differences.
“The good news is it looks like a lot of these (symptoms) tend to recover. But the other side of this, really the goal, is what can we change in that environment so they (service members) don’t have those symptoms anymore,” she said. “So, the other half of the project was all engineering in finding ways to decrease those forces. And the final piece of this is how do we generalize beyond this very specific cohort.”
Rex and her research partner Doug Adams, Daniel F. Flowers Professor of Engineering and executive director of the Institute of National Security, are very excited about the potential applications of BIHF — and how it could be applied to sports, construction and even mining.
“Because we have had a unique opportunity to collaborate closely with the incredible experts in the 160th, we have been able to identify strategies for reducing the aircrew’s exposure to these forces,” Adams said. “Together with the 160th and Dr. Rex, we used an aircraft to construct a realistic test facility in the lab so that we could evaluate all these strategies and identify the best approach.”
Rex said the project is rewarding to her because service members volunteer to risk their lives every day for our country.
“I am just very, very grateful for our service members,” she said. “They volunteer to preserve our liberties, and this is our way that we serve them, that we can give back. This is really a passion project for me.”
