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

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.