Blast Wave Exposure in Rats

We arbitrarily assigned rats to whole-body or torso-only configuration groups (n = 8 each). We used isoflurane to anesthetize the animals. Subsequently, we exposed them to a single blast using their respective setups and shock tubes at the NJIT. We measured the static pressure–time profile of the blast wave at distances of 2946 and 2692 mm from the membranes for whole-body and torso-only exposures, respectively, using a pressure sensor (model 134A24; PCB Piezotronics, Depew, NY) with its probe oriented parallel to the flow of the blast wave. We measured the intracranial pressure at the lateral ventricle and the intravascular pressure at the carotid artery using Millar pressure catheters (models SPR-407 and SPR-671, respectively, ADInstruments). In the torso-only configuration setup, the intracranial and carotid-artery pressure sensors were located outside of the shock tube (Fig. 1B, right). We implanted the sensors following the approach described in our previous study^{12 (link)}. For data acquisition, we used a custom LabVIEW code running on a multifunction data acquisition module (model PXI-6133; National Instruments, Austin, TX) and a PXI chassis (model PXIe-1082; National Instruments). We recorded the data at a sampling frequency of 1.0 MHz.