Mesh development of an infant finite element model for predicting skull fracture and intracranial hemorrhage in children from low height falls

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Title Mesh development of an infant finite element model for predicting skull fracture and intracranial hemorrhage in children from low height falls
Publication Type thesis
School or College College of Engineering
Department Mechanical Engineering
Author Johnson, Ryan Christopher
Date 2011-12
Description Traumatic brain injury is a leading cause of injury related deaths in the United States and children aged zero to four years are among the most likely to sustain such an injury. The most common cause is a fall; however, abuse is another common cause. Doctors are often required to determine if a child's injuries were accidental or the results of abuse. To help clinicians make the differential diagnosis a finite element model of a human infant head can be used to simulate impacts from falls and identify scenarios likely to cause skull fracture or internal hemorrhaging. Producing an accurate finite element model of an infant's head is difficult, and one of the challenges that must be overcome is the development of a stable and accurate mesh that conforms to the detailed geometry of the brain. A new meshing scheme was developed that produces geometrically accurate three-dimensional meshes of the several components present in a human head from computed tomography and magnetic resonance images. A convergence study was performed, and an appropriate mesh density that produced converged results was selected. Future work will develop an integrated finite element model of the infant head to run the simulations of low height falls for predicting head injury.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Finite element model ; Human head; Infant head; TBI; Mesh development; Model; Numerical grid generation
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name Master of Science
Language eng
Rights Management Copyright © Ryan Christopher Johnson 2011
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 1,199,351 bytes
Identifier us-etd3,66821
Source Orginal in Marriott Library Special Collections, QA3.5 2011 .J64
ARK ark:/87278/s6rn3pkx
Setname ir_etd
ID 194594
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6rn3pkx
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