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Computational Modeling of Traffic Related Thoracic Injury of a 10-Year-Old Child Using Subject-Specific Modeling Technique

  • Computational Biomechanics for Patient-Specific Applications
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Abstract

Traffic injuries have become a major health-related issue to school-aged children. To study this type of injury with numerical simulations, a finite element model was developed to represent the full body of a 10-year-old (YO) child. The model has been validated against test data at both body-part and full-body levels in previous studies. Representing only the average 10-YO child, this model did not include subject-specific attributes, such as the variations in size and shape among different children. In this paper, a new modeling approach was used to morph this baseline model to a subject-specific model, based on anthropometric data collected from pediatric subjects. This mesh-morphing method was then used to rapidly morph the baseline mesh into the subject-specific geometry while maintaining a good mesh quality. The morphed model was subsequently applied to simulate a real-world motor vehicle crash accident. A lung injury observed in the accident was well captured by the subject-specific model. The findings of this study demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed morphing approach to develop subject-specific human models, and confirm their capability in prediction of traffic injuries.

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Acknowledgements

This study is partially supported by Wayne State University Bioengineering Center and National Science Foundation for Young Scientists of China (Grant Number 51405148). The authors wish to express their gratitude to Mr. Mark Scarboro at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for providing CIREN data.

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Correspondence to Feng Zhu.

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Associate Editor Karol Miller oversaw the review of this article.

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Zhu, F., Jiang, B., Hu, J. et al. Computational Modeling of Traffic Related Thoracic Injury of a 10-Year-Old Child Using Subject-Specific Modeling Technique. Ann Biomed Eng 44, 258–271 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-015-1372-x

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