Biomechanical Investigation Of The Pelvis Artery Injury Under Side Impact

Impact and collision, which is caused by accidents such as traffic accidents andfall, may result in pelvic trauma which is frequently associated with pelvic vessel injury.This kind of injury is of high morbidity. Clinical findings suggest that pelvic arteryinjury(PAI) is closely related to pelvic fracture, while it is also found out that PAIoccurs without pelvic fracture. The current understanding to the mechanism of PAI isnot enough and deep, most of which is based upon the statistical analysis of clinicalcases and anatomy study rather than biomechanical research. Under such context, wepropose to investigated the mechanism of PAI under side impact from a biomechanicalstand, trying to providing associated fundamental theory support for predicting andtreating PAI clinically. The detailed work are listed as follows:1. With the help of CT Angiography of the pelvis, the outer contour of pelvic bone,skin, cartilage and artery were constructed. Then based upon the constructed contourand structures’ anatomical characteristics, the geometry of pelvis-femur-soft tissuecomplex were created using the techniques of reverse engineering. By using finiteelement preprocessing software, computational model of the complex was finished.2. Virtual experiments for validation were performed by reference to the loadcondition of reported experiments. The pelvis-femur-soft tissue complex was validatedby comparing the results of finite element model with the results of related experiments.The time of maximum force were close to the reported time. Region of high plasticstrain matched the reported bone fracture positions. Parameters, such as maximumcompression, viscous criterion and peak dissipated energy which all reflected theresponse of whole model, were close to the reported mean and between the reportedmaximum value and the reported minimum value. So this model could be used toinvestigated the pelvic artery injury under side impact.3. Under typical side impact, pelvic suffered the first acceleration impact betweenimpact-or and pelvic and the second deceleration impact between pelvic and lateralsupport. Finite element analysis revealed that the risk of pelvic artery injury increasedas the impacting energy increased. The artery most likely to be injured was commoniliac artery of the lateral side. It was also noted that pelvic artery injury was associatedwith bone fracture. 4. In order to explore the mechanism of pelvic artery injury experimentally, springaccelerated pelvic impact-or was proposed and designed. Impact force transducer wastested. Control interface was also designed. Kinematics capture techniques of bone andartery were discussed. Experimental procedure for artery re-pressurization was madeout. All these made preparations for conducting impact experiments of cadaver pelvic.For the first time the finite element model of pelvic-femur complex whichincluded artery was constructed. This model possessed anatomical integrity andaccuracy. It was also validated to be able to accurately reflect the impacting response ofpelvic-femur complex and thus could be used to investigate pelvic artery injury. Theresearch also indicated the motion and deformation of pelvic bone could result incommon iliac artery injury to some degree under side impact.