Spatial calcium kinetics after a traumatic brain injury

Accurate modelling of intracellular calcium ion (Ca^{2 +}) concentration evolution is valuable as it is known to rapidly increase during a Traumatic Brain Injury. In the work presented here, our older non-spatial model dealing with the effect of mechanical stress upon the Ca^{2 +} transportation in a neuron is spatialized by considering the brain tissue as a solid continuum with the Ca^{2 +} activity occurring at every material point. Starting with one-dimensional representation, the brain tissue geometry is progressively made realistic and under the action of pressure or kinematic impulses, the effect of dimensionality and material behaviour on the correlation between the stress and concomitant Ca^{2 +} concentration is investigated. The spatial calcium kinetics model faithfully captures the experimental observations concerning the Ca^{2 +} concentration, load rate, magnitude and duration and most importantly shows that the critical location for primary injury may not be the most important location as far as secondary injury is concerned.