Experimental Production of Head-Neck Injuries Under Dynamic Forces

Compression related mechanisms of injury are common in sports and recreational trauma to the human cervical spine. The purpose of these studies was to experimentally reproduce common clinically seen injuries of the head-neck complex. A total of 19 preparations (8 quasistatic, 11 dynamic) were used to obtain strength and motion information correlated to pathology. The quasistatic studies served to develope a method to kinematically monitor the localized deformations in the tissue as injury occurs. It was observed that significant relaxation of the tissues occur post-traumatically and the kinematic analysis quantified the true extent of the deformations to the cervical spine components. Under dynamic loading, mid to lower cervical spine compression-related trauma occurred. To reproduce these kinds of injuries, the pre-existing lordosis was removed and the head-neck complex was dynamically impacted. Parallel studies on the Hybrid III anthropomorphic manikin head-neck indicated a substantially different response in compression compared to the human cadaver specimens.