Eric Thelin

Preclinical rat experiments of traumatic brain injury are widely used for neurotrauma research and therapeutic development. Today, the causal pathway from experimental insults, to localized tissue strains, and ultimately the injury onset is unknown. Yet little biomechanical reference exists for researchers to design and improve animal tests. These limitations hinder the development of optimal experiments and incur cruel animal suffering and killing. The Virtual-Rat project aims to develop a high-biofidelity, high-resolution computational rat model with dual applications: i) advance the mechanistic understanding of brain injury by linking computational biomechanics with experimental pathology, and ii) enhance rat experiments by correlating external impact parameters to internal biomechanical responses via an open-access dataset. This project is aligned with the 3R principles, as it aims to replace rat experiments with computational simulations and reduce the number of rats needed by virtually improving the experimental design. This project will last for 3 years and its execution will be uniquely poised through close collaboration among competent biomechanists, computational engineers, and experimentalists from Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, Chalmers University of Technology, and Karolinska Institutet.