Update on the efforts to resolve remaining issues regarding the thoracic skeletal and soft tissue injury risk curves.

CEESAR presentation on behalf of ISO/WG6 and ACEA-TFD on the evaluation of injury risk curves.

The ISO working group presented the status of their activities to develop injury risk curves for the 50th male and 5th female dummies. In addition to upcoming web meetings, a face-to-face meeting will be held in November 2011 in conjunction with the Stapp Conference.

For the 50th male, all the curves are ready, but the group still needs to assign AIS levels and determine the best measurements to use to predict risk of injury. Additionally, the group is finalizing recommended guidelines to build injury risk curves, which were evaluated using the WorldSID 50th samples. It is expected that ISO will approve the final version of the guidelines and risk curves at their November 2011 meeting. A vehicle manufacturer requested that the WorldSID group agree to preliminary injury risk curves for the 50th to aid those that are testing, by having a standard performance metric. The group did not feel that they had enough information to make these recommendations at this time.

For the WorldSID 5th female, the scaling of test conditions to build the risk curves is the group’s main tasks. Transportation Research Labs (TRL) will conduct work on the effects of the different normalization possibilities, as sponsored by the European Commission. The group needs to find consensus on the scaled test conditions to be used before testing can start. NHTSA plans on conducting some of testing in the second half of 2011. Additionally, TRL will conduct some testing with a borrowed 5th female. Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) also offered to conduct some testing, if they can borrow a dummy. Transport Canada offered their 2 dummies for loan. Once data for all the test conditions are available, the group can begin building the injury risk curves using the guidelines developed for the 50th male.

A subgroup under ISO WG 6 is working to finalize the development of the injury risk curves for the WorldSID 50th male and use the same process to develop injury risk curves for the 5th female. The group achieved consensus to use the survival analysis as a basis to build the injury curves. The curves will be provided with 95% confidence intervals; the process for building these intervals is being evaluated. The 50th injury risk curves were developed as a function of commonly used measurements, further work is needed to define the good injury criteria among the commonly used measurements. Additionally, not all the test configurations were reproduced with the WorldSID 50th; the injury curves would be more robust if more PMHS tests were conducted.

Once the work on the 50th injury curves is completed, the group will begin work on the 5th female injury risk curves. The same methodology used to develop the 50th injury risk curves will be applied. Since there are no PMHS tests for the 5th female, the PMHS samples for the 50th male will be used, but additional work is needed on properly scaling the data. Once there is agreement on test conditions to be reproduced for the 5th female, these will be circulated to groups that are evaluating the dummy.

Mr Petit provided an update on the progress on the development of the ISO/WG6 WorldSID 50th injury risk curves (PSI-02-15). Mr Petit advised that the ISO/WG6 had agreed to use the survival analysis statistical method to construct the injury risk curves. To enable injury criteria limits to be finalised the ISO/WG6 will now need to establish the most suitable injury risk predictors for each body region (e.g. pelvis injury risk could be predicted by 3ms pelvis acceleration and/or pubic force) and the recommended thresholds. The same process would need to be followed for the WorldSID 5th. WG6 would meet again in May.

Mr Belcher presented data (2000-2009) on fatalities and serious injuries in Victorian (Australian state) side impact crashes by occupant age (PSI-02-16). It was noted that the 45 year age, which is currently used for the age scaling of current side impact dummy injury risk curves, exceeds (by age) around 85% of Victorian pole/tree side impact crash fatalities, but only around 50% of other side impact fatalities.

Mr Ridella presented a summary of an UMTRI investigation of the effects of occupant age on AIS 3+ injury outcomes (PSI-02-17). Mr Ridella undertook to investigate with UMTRI the possibility of separating pole side impacts from other side impacts in the data presented in this study. In response to a question from Ms Tylko, Mr Ridella indicated that while it would decrease the number of available cases, it was possible to identify contact point in the NASS data base.