Development Of A Three-year-old Child FE Neck Model And Injury Analysis

Because of the children’s naughty,curious,the form of children’s injuries is varied,the degree of injury is difficult to estimate,also children can not accurately describe the cause and location of injury,these often lead to the misdiagnosis of children’s injury or failure to timely discovery injury so that will cause serious consequences.Therefore,the study of children’s injuries has become a complicated and important issue.With the development of the advance of the finite element theory and software,and improving computational techniques,finite element models are widely used in the research of complex biological tissue injury mechanics and finite element analysis has become an important method.On the basis of literaturesearches about children’s injury,the author summarized the previous work,and gradually explored and mastered a set of methods on neck modeling.This paper used a real three-year-old child medical CT scan data to overcome the shortcomings of scaling model structure which cannot be consistent with the real structure of children’s anatomy,and to ensure the authenticity and reliability of the data to build the basic model.Through coordination control the size and quality of the model meshes,not only ensures the consistency between the model and the real anatomical structure,but also reduces the computational cost.Model geometry in this paper is based on a set of medical CT scan data of a three-years-old child in Tianjin.Firstly,the point cloud data of the three-year-old child neck was extracted by using threshold segmentation method by MIMICS,and the initial geometric model was obtained,including C1-C7 cervical,the first thoracic and a part of neck muscles.Secondly,reverse engineering software,Geomagic was used to obtain the initial geometric model by the geometric cleaning,smoothing,curved surface and other operations,to generate a CAD model with the NURBS.Thirdly,using the grid meshing software Truegrid and Hypermesh to create nodes and elements on the geometry model for the cervical spines and muscles,Under the process of quality inspection and mesh adjustment,the overall cervical shape was adjusted,construction of other soft tissues,such as disc,ligament,spinal cord,fat and skin was done.Finally,according to the detailed anatomy of the neck of the children’s anatomy,the finite element model of all parts is assembled to form the whole finite element neck model of the three-year-old child.In this paper,the neck model is validated by the model comparison with experimental results from the classic post collision test,rear impact test,front impact test,tensile test and axial impact test.With the corresponding boundary conditions and loading conditions are set up consistently with these tests.Scaling method was used to transform the adult experiment responses to three-year-old child with upper and lower bound curves.Model validations were done by comparing model responses with the upper and lower bound curves,low speed rear impact were also simulated.This three-year-old-child finite element neck model can provide a scientific guidance for child neck injury diagnosis,research and prevention.