Comparison of Different Radial Basis Functions in Developing Subject-Specific Infant Head Finite Element Models for Injury Biomechanics Study

Developing a subject-specific finite element (FE) model, especially with only high quality hexahedral solid elements and quadrilateral shell elements, is very time-consuming. Recently, template-based mesh morphing method has become popular to construct subject-specific FE models, in which a baseline FE mesh can be morphed into a FE model with subject-specific geometry. Because the mesh morphing algorithm could be programmed and run automatically, it is a very promising method for future applications of subject-specific FE models in injury biomechanics studies. Radial Basis Function (RBF) as a powerful spatial interpolation method has already been used as a mesh morphing method (1). The types of RBFs can affect the morphed mesh quality and geometry accuracy in the RBF method. However, to date, no previous study has tried to compare the differences generated by different RBFs. Therefore, in this study, different RBFs were used to morph a baseline infant head FE model into 10 different subject-specific infant head FE models based on CT images from 10 children aged from 0 to 3 months. The mesh quality and geometry accuracy of the subject-specific models generated by different RBFs were compared using statistic analysis.