HEAD IMPACT MONITORING: WHAT NEW METHODOLOGIES COULD DO FOR CONCUSSION BIOMECHANICS

Concussion has become a world-wide concern for sports participants. In-vivo head impacts monitoring has long been proposed as a way of identifying and even helping to prevent concussions. Several head impact devices were developed to measure head kinematics on the field, allowing the study of a wide range of sports. However, after fifteen years of data collection and despite a better understanding of injury mechanisms, concussion biomechanics still presents numerous challenges. This study aimed to summarize current knowledge of head impact monitoring via narrative and systematic reviews. The discussion was focused on how technology might have limited previous research, and how innovative analyses approaches might provide new opportunities to further our appreciation of concussion biomechanics

ISBS 2018 AUCKLAND CONFERENCE SKY TOWER AND CITY HARBOUR WALKING TOUR PROGRAMME

This is the Sky tower and city harbour walking tour programme. You will be guided to walk from AUT, through the Aotea Centre to see the town hall and the plaza large Maori archway. A few hundred metres to St Patrick’s cathedral and then to the Sky tower where you will ascend to the viewing platform levels. The Sky Tower stands at 328 meters and is New Zealand’s tallest man-made structure and the tallest man-made structure in the southern hemisphere. The building serves as a telecommunications tower and is part of SKYCITY Auckland, a complex which includes a casino and hotel as well as the observation deck. Visitors go to the top of the building in glass-fronted elevators and there they can take in the views from three viewing platforms. From the top you have views for 80km in every direction. On Level 60 (Sky Deck) sections of the main observation level floor are transparent and you can see right down to the ground 186 meters below. The upper Skydeck is just below the main antenna at 220 meters high. If you want to spend more time at the top of Sky Tower then you can dine at Peter Gordon’s The Sugar Club restaurant or have a light meal at the Sky Café or Orbit, the city’s only revolving restaurant. Thrill seekers can try the SkyJump, leaping off the building (while attached to a safety harness) or the SkyWalk, walking around on the outside of the building on a 1.2 meter wide platform 192 meters from the ground. Sometimes the tower is lit up with colours to honour a special event, national holiday, and charity or community initiatives. After the Sky tower visit, you will walk down Queens Street past the N to Z shop to Britomart station. You will then carry on to the water front and follow the water to the left. Queen Street Wharf is where the Maori tribes came in, some of the best navigators in the world. If you continue along the waterfront, you will get to the ferry terminal, from here there are ferries to many of the Hauraki Gulf Islands. There are 50 volcanoes in Auckland, some of which make up the islands in the Hauraki Gulf. The Auckland Ferry Building was originally completed in 1912. If you walk down the pier, you will get to Shed 10, which is the first place Maori started to export from. From here you will carry on along the waterfront until you get to the viaduct basin. Here there are lots of nice restaurants, as well as berths for up to 150 boats. These include America’s Cup yachts which you can book a sailing experience on. We will then continue, over the Wynyard Crossing, from which you can look back at the Viaduct Basin, to Wynyard Quarter, past the fish markets, to Silo Park. Here you can either hang out in the park, find a nice place to eat, or check out the current art exhibition “Into the Underworld”

HEAD IMPACTS DURING SPARRING: DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN MOUTHGUARD, SKIN, AND HEADGEAR SENSORS

The timely identification of concussions is essential to ensuring athlete safety. In contact sports, many devices are available to measure head impacts, but concerns remain regarding their ability to accurately estimate the number and magnitude of those impacts. This study measured head impacts during boxing sparring simultaneously with three sensors – a mouthguard, a skin patch and a headgear patch – and video analysis. The objective was to assess and compare the number, quality, and magnitude of impact events across sensor types. All sensors had issues related to decoupling from the skull, although the mouthguard appeared to generate better estimates than the patches of the number of impacts and impact-induced head kinematics

Toward more accurate and generalizable brain deformation estimators for traumatic brain injury detection with unsupervised domain adaptation

Machine learning head models (MLHMs) are developed to estimate brain deformation for early detection of traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, the overfitting to simulated impacts and the lack of generalizability caused by distributional shift of different head impact datasets hinders the broad clinical applications of current MLHMs. We propose brain deformation estimators that integrates unsupervised domain adaptation with a deep neural network to predict whole-brain maximum principal strain (MPS) and MPS rate (MPSR). With 12,780 simulated head impacts, we performed unsupervised domain adaptation on on-field head impacts from 302 college football (CF) impacts and 457 mixed martial arts (MMA) impacts using domain regularized component analysis (DRCA) and cycle-GAN-based methods. The new model improved the MPS/MPSR estimation accuracy, with the DRCA method significantly outperforming other domain adaptation methods in prediction accuracy (p<0.001): MPS RMSE: 0.027 (CF) and 0.037 (MMA); MPSR RMSE: 7.159 (CF) and 13.022 (MMA). On another two hold-out test sets with 195 college football impacts and 260 boxing impacts, the DRCA model significantly outperformed the baseline model without domain adaptation in MPS and MPSR estimation accuracy (p<0.001). The DRCA domain adaptation reduces the MPS/MPSR estimation error to be well below TBI thresholds, enabling accurate brain deformation estimation to detect TBI in future clinical applications

Padded Helmet Shell Covers in American Football: A Comprehensive Laboratory Evaluation with Preliminary On-Field Findings

Protective headgear effects measured in the laboratory may not always translate to the field. In this study, we evaluated the impact attenuation capabilities of a commercially available padded helmet shell cover in the laboratory and field. In the laboratory, we evaluated the efficacy of the padded helmet shell cover in attenuating impact magnitude across six impact locations and three impact velocities when equipped to three different helmet models. In a preliminary on-field investigation, we used instrumented mouthguards to monitor head impact magnitude in collegiate linebackers during practice sessions while not wearing the padded helmet shell covers (i.e., bare helmets) for one season and whilst wearing the padded helmet shell covers for another season. The addition of the padded helmet shell cover was effective in attenuating the magnitude of angular head accelerations and two brain injury risk metrics (DAMAGE, HARM) across most laboratory impact conditions, but did not significantly attenuate linear head accelerations for all helmets. Overall, HARM values were reduced in laboratory impact tests by an average of 25% at 3.5 m/s (range: 9.7 - 39.6%), 18% at 5.5 m/s (range: -5.5 - 40.5%), and 10% at 7.4 m/s (range: -6.0 - 31.0%). However, on the field, no significant differences in any measure of head impact magnitude were observed between the bare helmet impacts and padded helmet impacts. Further laboratory tests were conducted to evaluate the ability of the padded helmet shell cover to maintain its performance after exposure to repeated, successive impacts and across a range of temperatures. This research provides a detailed assessment of padded helmet shell covers and supports the continuation of in vivo helmet research to validate laboratory testing results.Comment: 49 references, 8 figure

ISBS 2018 AUCKLAND CONFERENCE SPRINZ-HPSNZ-AUT MILLENNIUM APPLIED PROGRAMME

An interactive afternoon of sessions delivered by High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) and AUT SPRINZ Biomechanists, Performance Analysts and other biomechanics relevant sport facing practitioners. The 11 sessions are at AUT Millennium (AUTM), which is a satellite site of AUT University and the Auckland training hub for many HPSNZ supported sports such as athletics, sailing, and swimming. These sports and others (cycling, rowing, snow sports etc.) will be represented in the line-up. The applied sessions involve practical demonstrations of aspects of analysis and/or tools used to deliver in the field to directly positively impact athletes performances on the world stage. Following these engaging sessions there will be tasting of New Zealand wine, allowing for further discussion and networking. Sir Graeme Avery will be acknowledged for his contribution to sport science. Mike Stanley is AUT Millennium Chief Executive & NZ Olympic Committee President will explain the partners in the facility. AUT Millennium is a charitable trust established to help New Zealanders live longer and healthier lives, and to enjoy and excel in sport through the provision of world-class facilities, services, research and education. Founded in 2002 as Millennium Institute of Sport and Health (MISH) by Sir Stephen Tindall and Sir Graeme Avery as a premium health and fitness facility for both athletes and the public alike. Partnered with AUT University in 2009, forming AUT Millennium, to expand research and education in the sporting sector. Professor Barry Wilson is an Adjunct Professor with SPRINZ at Auckland University of Technology and will be outlining the research and student opportunities. Martin Dowson is the General Manager Athlete Performance Support at High Performance Sport New Zealand and has overall responsibility for the programme. Simon Briscoe, AUT Millennium Applied Session Coordinator, is the head of the Performance and Technique Analysis discipline within HPSNZ. Simon is coordinating the applied sessions along with technical support from Dr Allan Carman, Research Fellow, AUT SPRINZ. Jodi Cossor and Matt Ingram will provide a demonstration of a multidisciplinary approach driven by biomechanical analysis for Paralympic swimmers. Justin Evans and Sarah-Kate Millar will provide a practical session assessing the athletes rowing stroke to assist the coach on technical changes. This session will demonstrate various rowing traits and how the biomechanist and coach can work together to optimise boat speed. Mike Schofield and Kim Hébert-Losier will provide a session looking at shotput and the evidence based approach to coaching. Dr Craig Harrison and Professor John Cronin will provide examples from the AUTM Athlete Development programme. Kim Simperingham and Jamie Douglas who work with high performance rugby athletes will outline sprinting mechanics in practice. Dr Bruce Hamilton, Fiona Mather, Justin Ralph and Rone Thompson will demonstrate the approach of HPSNZ and Cycling NZ performance health teams in the use of some specific tools for prevention of injury and optimisation of performance. Kelly Sheerin, Denny Wells and Associate Professor Thor Besier will provide examples of using IMU and motion capture methods for running and basketball biomechanics research, education and service. Dr Rodrigo Bini and Associate Professor Andrew Kilding will show how linking of biomechanics and physiology improves injury prevention and performance enhancement. Robert Tang, Andre de Jong and Farhan Tinwala discuss select projects developed by Goldmine, HPSNZ’s in-house engineering team, and how these innovations have enabled unprecedented levels of biomechanics feedback. Cameron Ross and Paul McAlpine demonstrate the technology being used at the Snow Sports NZ training centre in Cadrona to enhance load monitoring of athletes. This application allows greater insight into training performances and biomechanical loads than has been previously possible in the training environment. AUT Millennium tour guides are coordinated by Josh McGeown and include Enora Le Flao, Dustin Oranchuk, Erika Ikeda, Jono Neville, Aaron Uthoff, Andrew Pichardo, Farhan Tinwala, Shelley Diewald, Renata Bastos Gottgtroy, Jessica Yeoman, Casey Watkins, Eric Harbour, Anja Zoellner, Alyssa Joy Spence, Victor Lopez Jr, and Albert Chang

Assessing Head/Neck Dynamic Response to Head Perturbation: A Systematic Review

Background Head/neck dynamic response to perturbation has been proposed as a risk factor for sports-related concussion.Objectives The aim of this systematic review was to compare methodologies utilised to assess head/neck dynamic response to perturbation, report on magnitude, validity and reliability of the response, and to describe modifying factors.Methods A systematic search of databases resulted in 19 articles that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria.Results Perturbation methods for head/neck dynamic response included load dropping, quick release and direct impact. Magnitudes of perturbation energy varied from 0.1 to 11.8 J. Head/neck response was reported as neck muscle latency (18.6-88.0 ms), neck stiffness (147.2-721.9 N/rad, 14-1145.3 Nm/rad) and head acceleration (0.2-3.8g). Reliability was only reported in two studies. Modifying factors for head/neck response included younger and older participants presenting increased responses, females showing better muscular reactivity but similar or increased head kinematics compared with males, and bracing for impact limiting muscular activity and head kinematics.Discussion Substantial differences in experimental and reporting methodologies limited comparison of results. Methodological factors such as impact magnitude should be considered in future research.Conclusion Each methodology provides valuable information but their validity for anticipated and unanticipated head impacts measured in vivo needs to be addressed. Reports on head/neck response should include measurement of transmitted force, neck muscle latency, head linear and rotational accelerations, and neck stiffness. Modifying factors of anticipation, participants' age, sex, and sport are to be considered for head/neck dynamic response