Annual proceedings. Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine最新文献

This study deals with the analysis of lower leg fractures in pedestrians and bicyclists after collisions with passenger cars and examines to what extent the shape and location of the fractures in the lower leg changed, following alterations in the shape of bumpers. It can be assumed that that the bumpers changed in shape and effective impact height, not least due to the realization of the developments of vehicle safety tests as in the context of the European Union Directive 2003/102/EC on pedestrian protection. In addition, consumer protection tests, EuroNCAP, accomplished a change of the injury situation. All of these are mainly focused on pedestrian protection measurements but adopt the bicyclists also in their goal. For the study, traffic accidents from GIDAS (German in-Depth-Accident Study) were selected, which had been documented in the years 1995 to 2004 by scientific teams in Hannover and Dresden (Germany) and for which there is detailed information regarding injury patterns and collision speeds. The accident documentations can be regarded as representative and constitute a random sample with statistic weighing of the data. Altogether 143 cases of lower leg fractures (Tibia/ Fibula) with x-rays of pedestrians and 79 cases of bicyclists were differentiated according to new and old vehicles (year of manufacture before/after 1995). The bumper shapes were divided into classical types (protruding pronouncedly/ protruding integrated /integrated rounded). Besides the injuries to the lower leg, those to thighs and feet were also regarded, and the injury conditions involving the head and trunk were included in the kinematic analytics.

More US teens die from traffic crashes than from any other cause, with speed and rural roads major contributing factors. This study aimed to validate a high-fidelity simulator to explore these risks in an injury-free environment. Twenty-one newly-licensed 16-year-old males completed simulated and on-the-road drives of the same rural roads. Average free speeds on three road segments showed no systematic differences across segments. The majority of teens exhibited speeds in the simulator within 10% of those on-the-road. These findings validate the simulator for further research on teen driver free speeds on rural roads. Further analyses are needed to validate other performance measures.

Transdermal ethanol detection is a promising method that could prevent drunk driving if integrated into an ignition interlock system. However, experimental data from previous research has shown significant time delays between alcohol ingestion and detection at the skin which makes real time estimation of blood alcohol concentration via skin measurement difficult. Using a validated model we studied the effects that body weight, metabolic rate and ethanol dose had on the time lag between the blood alcohol concentration and transdermal alcohol concentration. The dose of alcohol ingested was found to have the most significant effect on the skin alcohol lag time; a dose of 15 ml of ethanol resulted in a peak lag time of approximately 33 minutes, while a dose of 60 ml of ethanol resulted in a peak time lag of 53 minutes. The time lag was found to be insensitive to body mass and only moderately sensitive to changes in metabolic rates.

Evaluations of crash protection safety features require measures for quantifying impact severity. Velocity change (delta-V) is the major descriptor of collision severity used in most real-world crash databases. One of the limitations of delta-V is that it does not account for the time over which the crash pulse occurs (delta-t). Late model GM vehicles equipped with event data recorders capture the cumulative delta-V in 10 ms intervals over the crash pulse. Deceleration can be readily calculated from these data and provides a complementary measure of severity that has not previously been available for real world crashes. The relationship between maximum delta-V and deceleration was examined for different vehicle platforms involved in real world frontal impacts and frontal crash tests. Maximum deceleration was observed to be closely correlated to the maximum delta-V.

We investigated whether the rating obtained in the EuroNCAP test procedures correlates with injury protection to vehicle occupants in real crashes using data in the UK Cooperative Crash Injury Study (CCIS) database from 1996 to 2005. Multivariate Poisson regression models were developed, using the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) score by body region as the dependent variable and the EuroNCAP score for that particular body region, seat belt use, mass ratio and Equivalent Test Speed (ETS) as independent variables. Our models identified statistically significant relationships between injury severity and safety belt use, mass ratio and ETS. We could not identify any statistically significant relationships between the EuroNCAP body region scores and real injury outcome except for the protection to pelvis-femur-knee in frontal impacts where scoring "green" is significantly better than scoring "yellow" or "red".

In the United States in 2005, there were 1,189 fatal crashes and 35,000 injurious crashes into guardrails. Current efforts to reduce fatalities occurring in guardrail collisions have focused on frontal oblique collisions of cars and light trucks into guardrail. These crashes however represent a diminishing target population for fatality reduction. This paper examines the current opportunities for reducing fatalities in guardrail collisions in the United States. The analysis was based upon crash data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and the National Automotive Sampling System General Estimates System (GES) for the years 2000-2005. The greatest opportunity for fatality reduction is the protection of motorcyclists, who now account for 32% of guardrail fatalities, and car and light truck occupants in side impact, who now comprise 14% of all guardrail fatalities. Together, protection of motorcycle riders and protection of car and light truck occupants in side impacts account for nearly half of all fatalities (46%) which occur in vehicle-guardrail collisions. Additional targets for fatality reduction include light truck rollover and collisions with guardrail ends.

Case-based hospital billing data from the Health Care Utilization Partnership was used to calculate annual statewide hospital charges for the acute care of traffic injuries in Nebraska. E-codes 810.0 through 819.9 identified traffic injury cases. Admissions and emergency department (ED)-only visits for traffic injuries accrued significantly higher charges than other types of care. Statewide, hospital charges for the acute care of traffic injury totaled more than U.S.dollars 63.8 million in 2004. Of this, 23.2% was charged to public payers (Medicare or Medicaid) and 5.5% was charged to self-pay (generally accepted as bad debt absorbed by the hospital system).

Major trauma is commonly defined using an Injury Severity Score (ISS) threshold of 15. Since this threshold was formulated, there have been significant developments in both the Abbreviated Injury Scale underlying the ISS, and trauma management techniques, both in the preventive and acute-care phases of trauma management. This study assesses whether this ISS threshold is appropriate when evaluating both mortality, and hospital-based indicators of morbidity, in a paediatric population using a large hospital trauma registry. Other registries and datasets using ISS >15 as an inclusion criterion may exclude a substantial body of data relating to significantly morbid trauma patients.

A weighted logistic regression with careful selection of crash, vehicle, occupant and injury data and sequentially adjusting the covariants, was used to investigate the predictors of the odds of head/face and neck (HFN) injuries during rollovers. The results show that unbelted occupants have statistically significant higher HFN injury risks than belted occupants. Age, number of quarter-turns, rollover initiation type, maximum lateral deformation adjacent to the occupant, A-pillar and B-pillar deformation are significant predictors of HFN injury odds for belted occupants. Age, rollover leading side and windshield header deformation are significant predictors of HFN injury odds for unbelted occupants. The results also show that the significant predictors are different between head/face (HF) and neck injury odds, indicating the injury mechanisms of HF and neck injuries are different.