Maximum principal strain correlates with spinal cord tissue damage in contusion and dislocation injuries in the rat cervical spine.

The heterogeneity of the primary mechanical mechanism of spinal cord injury (SCI) is not currently used to tailor treatment strategies because the effects of these distinct patterns of acute mechanical damage on long-term neuropathology have not been fully investigated. A computational model of SCI enables the dynamic analysis of mechanical forces and deformations within the spinal cord tissue that would otherwise not be visible from histological tissue sections. We created a dynamic, three-dimensional finite element (FE) model of the rat cervical spine and simulated contusion and dislocation SCI mechanisms.