Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology (Mar 2022)

The Presence of the Temporal Horn Exacerbates the Vulnerability of Hippocampus During Head Impacts

  • Zhou Zhou,
  • Zhou Zhou,
  • Xiaogai Li,
  • August G. Domel,
  • Emily L. Dennis,
  • Emily L. Dennis,
  • Marios Georgiadis,
  • Yuzhe Liu,
  • Samuel J. Raymond,
  • Gerald Grant,
  • Gerald Grant,
  • Svein Kleiven,
  • David Camarillo,
  • David Camarillo,
  • David Camarillo,
  • Michael Zeineh

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2022.754344
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

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Hippocampal injury is common in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients, but the underlying pathogenesis remains elusive. In this study, we hypothesize that the presence of the adjacent fluid-containing temporal horn exacerbates the biomechanical vulnerability of the hippocampus. Two finite element models of the human head were used to investigate this hypothesis, one with and one without the temporal horn, and both including a detailed hippocampal subfield delineation. A fluid-structure interaction coupling approach was used to simulate the brain-ventricle interface, in which the intraventricular cerebrospinal fluid was represented by an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian multi-material formation to account for its fluid behavior. By comparing the response of these two models under identical loadings, the model that included the temporal horn predicted increased magnitudes of strain and strain rate in the hippocampus with respect to its counterpart without the temporal horn. This specifically affected cornu ammonis (CA) 1 (CA1), CA2/3, hippocampal tail, subiculum, and the adjacent amygdala and ventral diencephalon. These computational results suggest that the presence of the temporal horn exacerbate the vulnerability of the hippocampus, highlighting the mechanobiological dependency of the hippocampus on the temporal horn.

Keywords