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

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.