Dependency of Head Impact Rotation on Head-Neck Positioning and Soft Tissue Forces

Humans are susceptible to traumatic brain injuries from rapid head rotations that shear and stretch the brain tissue. Conversely, animals such as woodpeckers intentionally undergo repetitive head impacts without apparent injury. Here, we represent the head as the end effector of a rigid linkage cervical spine model to quantify how head angular accelerations are affected by the linkage positioning (head-neck configuration) and the soft tissue properties (muscles, ligaments, tendons).

We developed a two-pivot manipulator model of the human cervical spine with passive torque elements to represent soft tissue forces. Passive torque parameters were fit against five human subjects undergoing mild laboratory head impacts with tensed and relaxed neck muscle activations. With this representation, we compared the effects of the linkage configuration dependent end-effector inertial properties and the soft tissue resistive forces on head impact rotation.

Small changes in cervical spine positioning (<5 degrees) can drastically affect the resulting rotational head accelerations (>100%) following an impact by altering the effective end-effector inertia. Comparatively, adjusting the soft tissue torque elements from relaxed to tensed muscle activations had a smaller (<30%) effect on maximum rotational head accelerations. Extending our analysis to a woodpecker rigid linkage model, we postulate that woodpeckers experience relatively minimal head impact rotation due to the configuration of their skeletal anatomy.

Cervical spine positioning dictates the head angular acceleration following an impact, rather than the soft tissue torque elements.

This analysis quantifies the importance of head positioning prior to impact, and may help us to explain why other species are naturally more resilient to head impacts than humans.