A standing vehicle occupant is likely to sustain a more severe injury than one who has flexed knees in an under‐vehicle explosion:​ a cadaveric study

Masouros, Spyros D.; Newell, Nicolas; Bonner, Timothy J.; Ramasamy, Arul; Hill, Adam M.; West, Andrew T. H.; Clasper, Jon C.; Bull, Anthony M. J.

Affiliations

¹Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, UK

²Academic Department of Military Surgery and Trauma, Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, Birmingham, UK

³Centre of Defence Imaging, Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, Birmingham, UK

⁴Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies, Imperial College London, UK

Abstract and keywords

The lower limb of military vehicle occupants has been the most injured body part due to undervehicle explosions in recent conflicts. Understanding the injury mechanism and causality of injury severity could aid in developing better protection. Therefore, we tested 4 different occupant postures (seated, brace, standing, standing with knee locked in hyper‐extension) in a simulated under‐vehicle explosion (solid blast) using our traumatic injury simulator in the laboratory; we hypothesised that occupant posture would affect injury severity.

No skeletal injury was observed in the specimens in seated and braced postures. Severe, impairing injuries were observed in the foot of standing and hyper‐extended specimens. These results demonstrate that a vehicle occupant whose posture at the time of the attack incorporates knee flexion is more likely to be protected against severe skeletal injury to the lower leg.

Keywords: Blast injury, anti‐vehicle mine, biomechanics, cadaveric, impact testing

Links

URL: http://www.ircobi.org/downloads/irc12/pdf_files/37.pdf

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Cited By (4)

Year	Entry
2013	Newell N, Masouros SD, Bull AMJ. A comparison of MiL‐Lx and Hybrid‐III responses in seated and standing postures with blast mats in simulated under‐vehicle explosions. In: Proceedings of the 2013 International IRCOBI Conference on the Biomechanics of Injury. September 11-13, 2013; Gothenburg, Sweden.135-144.
2016	Yoganandan N, Chirvi S, Pintar FA, Uppal H, Schlick M, Banerjee A, Voo L, Merkle A, Kleinberger M. Foot–ankle fractures and injury probability curves from post-mortem human surrogate tests. Ann Biomed Eng. October 2016;44(10):2937-2947.
2013	Newell N. Foot and Ankle Blast Injury and Its Mitigation [PhD thesis]. Imperial College London; June 2013.
2016	Bonner TJ. An Investigation Into Lower Limb Injuries Caused by Improvised Explosive Devices [PhD thesis]. Imperial College London; 2016.