Development of a 3-year-old child head–neck finite element model and derivation of novel head injury criterion

Abstract

Children are increasingly transported in cars or other modes of road transportation. With this increased travel comes the higher risk of children becoming involved in a vehicle accident as an occupant. Among the injuries included in the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS), the head is one of the most frequently injured parts of the body. For a 3-year-old child (3-YOC), the most common injury observed during a road accident is skull fracture. This study proposed to develop a 3-YOC head finite element model (FEM) based on the geometrical three-dimensional reconstruction of two-dimensional slices obtained using X-ray computed tomography scanning geometries. In order to reproduce the skull fracture and brain injury with the head FEM, 13 domestic accident reconstructions involving fall cases of 3-YOC were collected from the paediatric emergency departments of different hospitals. After the numerical reconstructions of these fall cases, some mechanical parameters were extracted and then correlated with the observed injuries.