Abstract
The liver and kidneys are the most commonly injured organs due to traumatic impact forces applied to the abdomen and pose a challenge to physicians due to a hard-to-diagnose risk of internal bleeding. A better understanding of the mechanism of injury will improve diagnosis, treatment, forensics, and other fields. Finite element modelling is a tool that can aid in this understanding, but accurate material properties are required including the strain rate dependency and the feasibility of using animal tissue properties instead of human. The elastic modulus in a probing protocol and the elastic modulus, failure stress, and failure strain in a compression protocol were found for both liver and kidney tissue from human and porcine specimens at varying strain rates. Increases in the elastic modulus were seen for both the human kidney and liver, but only for the porcine kidney, when comparing the unconfined compression and probing protocols. A strain rate dependency was found for both the liver and kidney properties and was observed to have a larger saturation effect at higher rates for the failure stress than for the elastic modulus. Overall, the material properties of intact liver and kidney were characterized, and the strain rate dependency was numerically modelled. The study findings suggest that some kidney and liver material properties vary from human to porcine tissue. Therefore, it is not always appropriate to use material properties of porcine tissue in computational or physical models of the human liver and kidney.
Highlights
Abdominal injuries sustained during impact events such as motor vehicle crashes are noteworthy in their severity
Automotive Sampling Study of motor vehicle crashes in the United States from 1998–2004 reported that abdominal organ injuries make up only a small percentage of overall traumas, they account for 13% of critical injuries
An unconfined compression and probing protocol were used to characterize the mechanical properties of the intact human and porcine kidney
Summary
Abdominal injuries sustained during impact events such as motor vehicle crashes are noteworthy in their severity. Automotive Sampling Study of motor vehicle crashes in the United States from 1998–2004 reported that abdominal organ injuries make up only a small percentage of overall traumas, they account for 13% of critical injuries. Due to the quantity of injuries, and the life-threatening impact of these injuries, studies investigating the injury mechanism have become increasingly common to improve understanding in a variety of fields such as safety, forensics, diagnostic medicine, etc. Crash test dummies are often used to model human response during motor vehicle accidents and other impacts, including physical abdominal organ models capable of measuring and predicting injuries is difficult and requires a large amount of resources [5].
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