Development And Validation Of 1.5-Year-Old Child Head Finite Element Model

Traumatic head injury has become one of the most severe threats to children’s lives oweing to its high incidence and high fatality rate. It has been reported that under the similar conditions of head injury, children will sustain more severe consequences than adults because of the marked anatomical differences between children and adults. Due to ethical concerns, it is extremely difficult to obtain sufficient child cadavers for biomechanical tests of pediatric head injuries. In recent years, biofidelic child head FE models have been developed and used in computed research of pediatric head trauma as effective tools. Convinced results of computed calculation relies on fully validated FE models which haven’t been established in a large scale oweing to the lack of child cadaver test data. Additionally, there is no child head model in the age range 1-2 years existing around the world. Children of 1-2 years old are frequently subjected to falling accidents because of their physiological and mental aspects so that unique regulations have been set up for this group of children in car assessment programs and development protocols of protecting facilities. As a result, the main focus of this work is to build an accurate 1.5-year-old child head FE model validated against child cadaver test and to commence on the child head injury biomechanics research.In this paper, a 1.5-year-old child head FE model with detailed anatomical structures was developed through medical 3D reconstruction and FE preprocess of geometrical data extracted from a set of MRI&CT scan images of a 1.5-year-old child. The anatomic structures include scalp, cranial bones, facial skull, jaw, tentorium, dura mater, CSF, cerebrum, cerebellum, brainstem, corpus callosum and etc. 1.5-year-old child head FE model together with FE models developed previously by our research group completes the FE model series which can be used in comparative study of child head injury.The 1.5-year-old child head FE model was used to reconstruct the cadaver drop test conducted by Loyd, results of simulations showed that the FE model had high biofidelity and was able to reflect the load condition of child head in real drop scenes. Analysis of dynamic responses and intracranial pressure predicted for different impact locations was done based on the simulative results. In addition, reconstruction and FE simulation of a head-injured falling accident in which the patient is a 21-month-old child was conducted to compare biomechanic responses predicted by FE model wtih real-life injury. It can be concluded that the 1.5-year-old child head FE model is capable to predict injury risk and distribution so that it can be used in the follow-up in-depth injury biomechanics investigation.