Cervical spine finite element modeling of a six-year-old child

With the increase in registered automobiles, children involved in motor vehicle accidents have been on the rise, but protection of children is not optimal. For better understanding of child injury mechanisms, the study built a cervical spine finite element model of a 6-year-old child. Firstly, the geometry of the cervical spine was acquired from a 6-year-old child by 64 dual-source CT thin scan. Secondly, a smooth NURBS model was built by utilizing surface reconstruction technologies for Reverse Engineering. Lastly, the finite element model was built in the Abaqus 6.9 software. The model validation was conduced against the dummy model crash test in MADYMO. The dynamic response rule of our model was similar with one of the multi-body dummy model in frontal impact accident.