Modelling Paediatric Bones: Estimating mechanical strength of paediatric femurs using a personalised computational modelling technique.

Forty four million children, under the age of 15, in Europe have been physically abused, as suggested by a 2013 report (World Health Organization, 2013); with children under the age of three being more prevalent to repeated abuse as they can’t narrate the incident themselves (Ravichandiran, et al., 2010). However assessing the mechanisms of these injuries and determining which are accidental, depends largely on clinician’s judgement, for which there is little reliable evidence. More accurate diagnoses can be made by quantitatively analysing the forces required to fracture these bones by creating individualised biomechanical models of bones. The aim of this project is to investigate the fracture mechanism of paediatric femurs using personalised finite element modelling. Thirty computational models of the femur were created using CT. Each model was subjected to four point bending simulations and the force to failure was estimated. It was found that the force to fracture increases as the age, weight and height increases. In the future, further mechanical simulations can be applied to these models and the process repeated for the tibia, and the predicted results can be used to compare against injury data collected in the clinic in order to further develop this modelling framework.