Search Results

Child head trauma in the United States is responsible for 30% of all childhood injury deaths with costs estimated at $10 billion per year. The common tools for studying this problem are the child anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs). The headform sizes and structural properties of child ATDs are based on various anthropometric studies and scaled Hybrid III mass and center of gravity (CG) properties. The goals of this study were to produce pediatric head and skull contours, provide estimates of pediatric head mass, mass moment of inertia and CG locations, and compare the head contours with the current child ATD head designs. To that end, computer tomography (CT) scans from one hundred eighty-five children in twelve age groups were analyzed to develop three-dimensional head and skull contours. The contours were averaged to estimate head and skull contours for children aged 1 month to 10 years. Inertial properties were estimated from a small sample of post-mortem human subjects (PMHSs).

Pediatric cervical spine biomechanics have been under-researched due to the limited availability of pediatric post-mortem human subjects (PMHS). Scaled data based on human adult and juvenile animal studies have been utilized to augment the limited pediatric PMHS data that exists. Despite these efforts, a significant void in pediatric cervical spine biomechanics remains. Eighteen PMHS osteoligamentous head-neck complexes ranging in age from 20 weeks gestational to 14 years were tested in tension. The tests were initially conducted on the whole cervical spine and then the spines were sectioned into three segments that included two lower cervical spine segments (C4-C5 and C6-C7) and one upper cervical spine segment (O-C2). After non-destructive tests were conducted, each segment was failed in tension. The tensile stiffness of the whole spines ranged from 5.3 to 70.1 N/mm.