The biomechanical injury calculator: a postprocessor software for a finite element human body model

Area of Science:

• Biomechanics
• Injury Biomechanics
• Computational Human Modeling

Background:

• The Global Human Body Model Consortium (GHBMC) provides advanced human body models for injury research.
• Accurate post-simulation injury risk assessment is crucial for understanding and mitigating physical trauma.
• Existing methods may lack comprehensive analysis across multiple body regions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce the Biomechanical Injury Calculator (BIC) as a postprocessor for the GHBMC model.
• To enable calculation of injury probabilities for specific body regions (head, neck, spine, pelvis) and overall.
• To validate BIC's predictive accuracy using real-world injury data.

Main Methods:

• Development of the Biomechanical Injury Calculator (BIC) tool.
• Integration of BIC with the GHBMC M50-OS v2.3 +DeformSpine model.
• Validation against 103 airmen's seat ejection injuries using 30 vertical seat load simulations.

Main Results:

• BIC demonstrated strong correlation between predicted and observed injury rates (Spearman=0.943, Pearson=0.982).
• The margin of error was within 5.16%.
• The overall predicted injury probability (58.48%) closely matched the observed rate (56.3%).

Conclusions:

• The Biomechanical Injury Calculator (BIC) is a validated tool for assessing injury risk in human body models.
• BIC provides reliable predictions for head, neck, spine, and pelvis injuries.
• This tool enhances safety evaluations in biomechanical simulations.