Mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) occurs daily in virtually every human activity. Certainly, traffic accidents account for the vast majority of all such trauma. Concussions also occur in sports and recreational activities. American professional football provides a unique opportunity to study MTBI. That opportunity comes not from the particularly high frequency of occurrence (many sports are higher, e.g. boxing, ice hockey), but from the following facts:​

• The game is played on a precisely laid out grid.
• The movement of players is recorded by video cameras from a multitude of directions and angles.
• The subjects are all of comparable stature, age and physical condition and they are all equipped with virtually the same protective headgear.
• Physicians at the sidelines are available immediately to diagnose and treat an injury.

This unique “laboratory” is being analyzed through a program involving four complimentary approaches:​

1. Video recordings of MTBI events are analysed to determine the kinematics, i.e. the relative speed, direction and impact sites on player’s heads.
2. In addition to clinical observations made by team physicians, concussed and uninjured players are subjected to neuropsychological assessment.
3. Re-enactments of certain collisions are conducted with instrumented anthropometric test devices (ATD’s).
4. Responses from the ATD heads are used to drive a mathematical model (FEM) of the human brain that predicts intracranial distortion patterns.

It is intended that the results of the neuropsychological testing, as well as the medical evidence, be correlated to the FEM brain distortion patterns. The overall objective of the program is to develop new biomechanical criteria for MTBI. The new criterion functions will be based upon the measured ATD head translational and rotational accelerations and will be helpful in developing new standards for protective headgear. The present paper outlines the methodology and considers one example of incident reconstruction.