SIMULATION STUDY TO COMPARE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE BLAST-INDUCED OBJECTIVE INDICES AND THE SURVIVAL RATE OF SUBJECTS WITH PRIMARY BLAST LUNG INJURY

Abstract

When an injury due to blast overpressure (BOP) is generated, it is important to estimate the severity of the injury using information about the blast conditions and to supply proper treatments according to the degree of the damage. However, there have been no investigations that have tried to verify the relationship between the blast-related objective indices and the degree of blast-induced injury. In this study, the correlations between the survival rate of the subjects with BOP-induced lung damage and each of four blast-induced indices, first principal strain, first principal strain rate, first principal stress and pulmonary inner pressure, were investigated using a simplified thorax model by introducing the concept of the V-ACC-V-LUNG ratio graph which represents the volume ratio between the seriously-damaged meshes and the overall meshes of the thorax model in respect to each index. Experimental results demonstrated that the decay parameters of the sigmoidal curve-fitted graphs of the first principal stress are the most effective of the analyzed indices for the estimation of the survival rate in patients with blast-induced lung damage. The results have a potential clinical application to improve the efficacy of treatment for blast injury patients.