Due to its visibility in athletes and returned service members, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has received widespread attention. But it’s an injury that is still poorly understood. While studies suggest that some people are more vulnerable to TBI than others or that the direction of head motion and the nature of the impact affects the chances of injury, these ideas have not yet been confirmed by studying human brain motion.

Now, engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have designed an experiment using magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) that directly assesses how skull motion direction impacts in vivo human brain deformation.