Hexahedral mesh of anatomical atlas for construction of computational human brain models: Applications to modeling biomechanics and bioelectric field propagation

Numerical simulations rely on constructing accurate and detailed models to produce reliable results - a task that is often challenging. This task becomes notably more difficult when the model is of the human brain, the most complex organ of the human body. We create an anatomically comprehensive hexahedral mesh of the human brain using an open-source digital brain atlas from the Open Anatomy Project. This atlas currently includes over three hundred labelled anatomical structures of the brain and represents over two decades of development. It is a valuable tool currently used by medical professionals, medical students, and researchers for gathering, presenting, and discovering knowledge about the human brain. We demonstrate that this atlas can be used to efficiently create a detailed hexahedral finite element mesh of the brain for scientific computing. The two-way correspondence between the mesh and the atlas facilitates the construction of computational models and the communication and analysis of results. We present two case studies. The first case study constructs a biomechanical model of the brain to compute brain deformations and predict traumatic brain injury risk due to violent impact. In the second case study, we construct a bioelectric model of the brain to solve the electroencephalography (EEG) forward problem, a frequent simulation process used in electrophysiology to study electromagnetic fields generated by the nervous system. These techniques are often used to help understand the behavior and functionality of the brain or for treating neurological disorders such as epilepsy. We demonstrate efficient and accurate model construction using the meshed anatomical brain atlas, as well as emphasize the importance of effective communication and contextual analysis of results for enabling multi-disciplinary scientific computing research.