Citation

Lai CH, Doong JL, Teng TL, Hsu CC. Proc. Int. Tech. Conf. Enhanced Safety Vehicles 2005; 2005: 7p.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, In public domain, Publisher National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In a laboratory crash test, the injury criteria of occupants, such as Head Injure Criterion (HIC), Nij, Combined Thorax Index (CTI) etc., can be obtained and transferred to the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS). The calculated AIS value usually represents the severity of injury and can be adopted to evaluate the safety of the test vehicle. However, the AIS cannot reflect the medical resources consumed due to various vehicles of different designs. This study presents a statistical method to estimate injury medical cost from the AIS value of an occupant in a crash test. A frontal impact case study is illustrated. Five steps are carried out as follows: 1. Link the following three Taiwan’s databases by the individual identification number: crash data reported by police officers, hospital data recorded in the health insurance database, and death database. 2. Calculate AIS values by the diagnosis ICD-9-CM code written by doctors for each individual case. 3. Develop a statistical model to estimate medical cost from massive crash cases obtained in step 2. 4. Simulate crash test for obtaining the injuries of occupant by using a validated finite element simulation model of Hybrid III 50th percentile male dummy. The injuries of the occupant are then converted to AIS values. 5. Estimate the probable medical cost by the statistical model using the predicted AIS values from the crash test simulation.