Technical Paper
Incidence and Severity of Cerebral Concussion in the Rhesus Monkey Following Sagittal Plane Angular Acceleration
1978-02-01
780886
A series of forty experiments has been performed on Rhesus monkeys in which the heads were subjected to a controlled single approximately sinusoidal pulse of angular acceleration about a fixed axis perpendicular to the sagittal plane. The head was constrained to undergo planar motion with a total angular displacement of 60 degrees in each case. Angular acceleration values ranged up to 1.2 x 105 rad/sec2, and peak values of tangential acceleration at the center of the mass of the brain reached 1300 g's. Physiological and neurological data including EKG, EEG, systemic arterial pressure, intracranial pressure, respiration, corneal reflex, were recorded. The post insult state was evaluated for each subject in accordance with a scale of Experimental Trauma Severity (ETS) based on the observed changes in the physiological and neurological variables. The ETS scale ranges from 0 (absence of any changes) to 6 (instantaneous death with gross brain fragmentation).