Expansion and evaluation of data characterizing the structural behavior of the pediatric abdomen.

Despite the importance of abdominal injuries in children involved in motor vehicle collisions, only two papers have reported experimental data quantifying the pediatric abdominal response to belt loading. One developed and characterized a porcine model of the pediatric abdomen and the other presented a series of tests performed on a single pediatric (7-year-old female) post-mortem human subject (PMHS) and used the data to evaluate the efficacy of the porcine model. The current paper presents the results from an additional pediatric (6-year-old female) PMHS test series and an expanded evaluation of the porcine model using the combined PMHS data.