Age thresholds for increased mortality of predominant crash induced thoracic injuries.

The growing elderly population in the United States presents medical, engineering, and legislative challenges in trauma management and prevention. Thoracic injury incidence, morbidity, and mortality increase with age. This study utilized receiver-operator characteristic analysis to identify the quantitative age thresholds associated with increased mortality in common isolated types of thoracic injuries from motor vehicle crashes (MVCs).

Investigating injury mechanism and occupant bmi for malleolar fractures in frontal motor vehicle collisions - biomed 2010.

Injury statistics show that lower extremity injuries follow second to head trauma in motor vehicle crashes. Fractures to the ankle/foot make up approximately 35% of all lower extremity injuries in motor vehicle crashes. Previous studies have shown that toe pan intrusion is one of the main causes of foot and ankle fractures in motor vehicle crashes (MVC).

Pregnant female anthropometry from ct scans for finite element model development.

In this study, anthropometry data is collected from a CT scan of a pregnant abdomen at 32 weeks gestation. Over 1500 fetal losses occur each year in the United States due to motor vehicles crashes. Pregnant occupants involved in motor vehicle crashes are at risk for pregnancy-specific injuries.

Categorical similarity comparison of ciren and nass.

In vehicle crash and injury databases, it is beneficial to have a similarity metric between databases so that cases can be compared and used in analyses. The Mahalanobis metric was used to quantitatively score the similarity between certain database entries in Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) cases and those same entries in the National Automotive Sampling System (NASS) population. One difficulty with this is that many fields within CIREN and NASS are non-ordinal in nature, requiring additional preprocessing prior to analysis.

Humerus fracture bending risk function for the 50th percentile male.

The increase in upper extremity injuries in automobile collisions, because of the widespread implantation of airbags, has lead to an increased focus in humerus injury criteria. Risk functions for upper extremity injury that can be used in instrumented upper extremities would be useful. This paper presents a risk function for humerus injury for the 50th percentile male based on bending fracture moment data gathered from previous studies.

Volumetric splenic injury measurement in ct scans for comparison with injury score.

The spleen is a commonly injured organ in Motor Vehicle Crash (MVC) with 22 percent of all MVC occupants receiving a spleen injury. Previous studies have been performed to investigate the correlation between the injury grading scales and the volumetric relationship of injured tissue to uninjured tissue using a semi-automated tissue thresholding in image processing software. This study develops a method for semi-automating this methodology by comparing radiopacity in the major blood vessels to that of the injured spleen.

Geometric scaling factors for the pediatric brainstem.

Injuries caused by motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) are the leading cause of death for children in the United States as well as the leading cause of head injury. Improved finite element models that integrate the correct shape of the pediatric brain with current injury prediction metrics would improve occupant response prediction for the pediatric occupant. The focus of this study is the improvement of geometric scaling factors for the brainstem to adapt current adult brain models to a pediatric model.

Development of a finite element-based injury metric for pulmonary contusion part I: model development and validation.

Pulmonary contusion is the most commonly identified thoracic soft tissue injury in an automobile crash and after blunt chest trauma and affects 10-17% of all trauma admissions. The mortality associated with pulmonary contusions is significant and is estimated to be 10-25%. Thus, there is a need to develop a finite element model based injury metric for pulmonary contusion for the purpose of predicting outcome.