AUTOMATED MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUE FOR THE DETERMINATION OF REGIONAL SKULL AND SCALP CONSTITUENT THICKNESS

摘要

The human skull is a multi-layered composite system critical in protecting the brain during head impact. Headimpact studies investigating skull injury thresholds have suggested that the skull and scalp thickness affect the risk offracture. Therefore, accurately determining the dimensions of skull-scalp constituents is a necessary step in attributing thecontribution to response, failure mechanisms and in developing high fidelity human models. However, prior methods tocollect these data include physical measurements of biopsies and manual segmentation in X-ray images. These methods areinvasive and impractical for clinical applications, or insufficient to characterize the regional variance in the skull-scalpconstituents for a full mechanical strength characterization. The newly developed methods in this study describe anautomated, regional, and objective-based measurement technique to characterize the average thickness and variance in skulland scalp constituents using quantitative computed tomography (QCT). The developed approach was successfully employedon 7 specimens at 5 anatomically defined locations. Results report the thicknesses for each layer, with the layer of greatestvariation being the trabecular bone (diploë) having a standard deviation of 35.6% of its mean thickness. These results will beused to define skull morphology for modeling relative impact injury risk that will be experimentally validated.