Military Injury Biomechanics: The Cause and Prevention of Impact Injuries is a reference manual where information and data from a large number of sources, focussing on injuries related to military events, has been critically reviewed and discussed. The book covers the cause and prevention of impact injuries to all the major body regions, while topics such as the historical background of military impact biomechanics, the history and use of anthropomorphic test devices for military applications and the medical management of injuries are also discussed. An international team of experts have been brought together to examine and review the topics. The book is intended for researchers, postgraduate students and others working or studying defence and impact injuries.
Military Injury Biomechanics: The Cause and Prevention of Impact Injuries is a reference manual where information and data from a large number of sources, focussing on injuries related to military events, has been critically reviewed and discussed. The book covers the cause and prevention of impact injuries to all the major body regions, while topics such as the historical background of military impact biomechanics, the history and use of anthropomorphic test devices for military applications and the medical management of injuries are also discussed. An international team of experts have been brought together to examine and review the topics. The book is intended for researchers, postgraduate students and others working or studying defence and impact injuries.
This book provides a state-of-the-art look at the applied biomechanics of accidental injury and prevention. The editors, Drs. Narayan Yoganandan, Alan M. Nahum and John W. Melvin are recognized international leaders and researchers in injury biomechanics, prevention and trauma medicine. They have assembled renowned researchers as authors for 29 chapters to cover individual aspects of human injury assessment and prevention. This third edition is thoroughly revised and expanded with new chapters in different fields. Topics covered address automotive, aviation, military and other environments. Field data collection; injury coding/scaling; injury epidemiology; mechanisms of injury; human tolerance to injury; simulations using experimental, complex computational models (finite element modeling) and statistical processes; anthropomorphic test device design, development and validation for crashworthiness applications in topics cited above; and current regulations are covered. Risk functions and injury criteria for various body regions are included. Adult and pediatric populations are addressed. The exhaustive list of references in many areas along with the latest developments is valuable to all those involved or intend to pursue this important topic on human injury biomechanics and prevention. The expanded edition will interest a variety of scholars and professionals including physicians, biomedical researchers in many disciplines, basic scientists, attorneys and jurists involved in accidental injury cases and governmental bodies. It is hoped that this book will foster multidisciplinary collaborations by medical and engineering researchers and academicians and practicing physicians for injury assessment and prevention and stimulate more applied research, education and training in the field of accidental-injury causation and prevention.
Advances in trauma care have accelerated over the past decade, spurred by the significant burden of injury from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Between 2005 and 2013, the case fatality rate for United States service members injured in Afghanistan decreased by nearly 50 percent, despite an increase in the severity of injury among U.S. troops during the same period of time. But as the war in Afghanistan ends, knowledge and advances in trauma care developed by the Department of Defense (DoD) over the past decade from experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq may be lost. This would have implications for the quality of trauma care both within the DoD and in the civilian setting, where adoption of military advances in trauma care has become increasingly common and necessary to improve the response to multiple civilian casualty events. Intentional steps to codify and harvest the lessons learned within the military's trauma system are needed to ensure a ready military medical force for future combat and to prevent death from survivable injuries in both military and civilian systems. This will require partnership across military and civilian sectors and a sustained commitment from trauma system leaders at all levels to assure that the necessary knowledge and tools are not lost. A National Trauma Care System defines the components of a learning health system necessary to enable continued improvement in trauma care in both the civilian and the military sectors. This report provides recommendations to ensure that lessons learned over the past decade from the military's experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq are sustained and built upon for future combat operations and translated into the U.S. civilian system.
The amount of load that can be borne by the different components of the lumbar region is fairly well understood, as are resulting injuries from overloading. Less severe lumbar injuries involve a wide range of factors, including: heredity, obesity, age, occupation, sports, cardiovascular risk factors, and depression. Some of the most painful conditions that require high levels of care involve lumbar spine fracture or soft tissue injury from falls, contact sports, vehicle collisions, aircraft ejection, and underbody blasts from roadway explosions (military injuries). Each of these injury scenarios elicits a different kinematic response of the spine as a result of load direction, magnitude, and duration. Updated from a popular earlier volume, this new compendium includes landmark papers from 1994 through 2013 that focus exclusively on lumbar injuries. It also features an introductory chapter, “Blunt Lumbar Trauma” that provides an overview of the anatomy of the lumbar region, injury, and injury mechanisms, as well as an extensive literature update. This edition is the third in a series of biomechanics compendia edited by Mr. Pike. Earlier editions covered injuries of the neck and head. For this volume, Mr. Pike and the advisory panel selected 15 of the best papers from a variety of sources including SAE International, IRCOBI, Stapp, NHTSA, ESV, and the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. The book will be helpful to those studying lumbar injury from a broad range of causes, including transportation, falls, sports, personal violence, and blast-related. Professionals from a variety of disciplines will find the book useful: biomechanics, accident reconstruction, medical and rehabilitation, insurance, legal, and law enforcement.
Nervous system redundancies have a counterpart in human biomechanics which are evident when analyzing man-task performance using simulations of functional disabilities. These multiple choice pathways available for task accomplishment could explain some of the surprisingly small drops in performance in the presence of otherwise significant tissue trauma especially in cases of highly motivated soldiers. Such findings are thought to be useful in a bioengineering approach for optimizing man-machine or man-task relationships and deriving technical rules for the design of body armor and protective clothing for minimizing personal injury from ballistic agents.
Assessment of the physical dimensions of the human body and application of this knowledge to the design of tools, equip ment, and work are certainly among the oldest arts and sciences. It would be an easy task if all anthropometric dimensions, of all people, would follow a general rule. Thus, philosophers and artists embedded their ideas about the most aesthetic proportions into ideal schemes of perfect proportions. "Golden sections" were developed in ancient India, China, Egypt, and Greece, and more recently by Leonardo DaVinci, or Albrecht Durer. However, such canons are fictive since actual human dimensions and proportions vary greatly among individuals. The different physical appearances often have been associated with mental, physiological and behavioral characteristics of the individuals. Hypocrates (about 460-377 BC) taught that there are four temperaments (actually, body fluids) represented by four body types. The psychiatrist Ernst Kretchmer (1888-1964) proposed that three typical somatotypes (pyknic, athletic, aesthenic) could reflect human character traits. Since the 1940's, W. H. Sheldon and his coworkers devised a system of three body physiques (endo-, meso-, ectomorphic). The classification was originally qualitative, and only recently has been developed to include actual measurements.
Injury is a leading cause of death, hospitalisation and disability world-wide. The World Health Organization predicts that unintentional injuries arising from road traffic incidents will rise to take third place in the rank order of international disease burden by the year 2030. Although these statistics and the associated economic costs are staggering, the effect of unintentional injury and death from trauma is more apparent, and more disturbing, when seen personally. By a young age, nearly everyone in the world, regardless of region, wealth or education, has had a relative or someone that they know killed or disabled in an "accident". The quality of life and financial effects on the injured person and their families and friends are plainly evident and clearly devastating. Many unintentional injuries are in reality not accidents; they could be prevented with changes in policy, education, or through improved safety devices. Arrayed against these preventable injuries, a diverse group of injury prevention researchers and practitioners work to decrease the incidence of unintentional injury. In trauma biomechanics, the principles of mechanics are used to understand how injuries happen at the level of the bones, joints, organs and tissues of the body. This knowledge is central in the development, characterization and improvement of safety devices such as helmets and seat belts and in the safe design of vehicles and equipment used for transportation, occupation and recreation.
This text is designed to present a comprehensive and state-of the-art approach to dismounted complex blast injuries. Sections address care of these patients from the point of injury through rehabilitation. The specific areas addressed include blast mechanics, stabilization and hemorrhage control at the point of injury, early resuscitation at local hospitals, a systematic approach to surgical care, and finally reconstruction and rehabilitation. Specific chapters focus on operative management of pelvic, abdominal, genitourinary, orthopedic, neurological and thoracic injuries. The authors of each chapter, are experts in treating DCBIs that have had direct hands-on experience through military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each chapter describes patient presentation and an algorithm outlining treatment with support from the literature. The text will conclude with three chapters. The first explores new advances in care that can be applied to these injuries. The second highlights the organization and team approach to care of these patients. Finally, the last chapter describes an actual case, cared for by the editors, that encompasses points from the chapters in the text. Extensive illustrations and flow diagrams are used throughout the text. This text is specifically designed to be a “how to” guide for inexperienced military and civilian providers. The chapters are organized in a step-wise fashion that mirrors the patient’s course from point of injury through their hospital course. Combining authors’ experience with illustrations and algorithm diagrams creates a text that is easy to use as a reference text or basis of training for future military and civilian surgeons.
