Search Results

Pulmonary contusion is the most commonly identified thoracic soft tissue injury in an automobile crash and after blunt chest trauma and affects 10-17% of all trauma admissions. The mortality associated with pulmonary contusions is significant and is estimated to be 10-25%. Thus, there is a need to develop a finite element model based injury metric for pulmonary contusion for the purpose of predicting outcome. This will enable current and future finite element models of the lung to incorporate an understanding of how stress and strain may be related to contusion injuries. This study utilizes 14 impacts onto male Sprague-Dawley rats. In 5 of these tests, a calibrated weight (46 g) is dropped from a height of 44 cm directly onto the lungs of intubated, anesthetized rats in situ. Contused volume is estimated from MicroPET scans of the lung and normalized on the basis of liver uptake of 18F-FDG.