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Abusive head trauma (AHT) is a potentially fatal result of child abuse, but the mechanisms by which injury occur are often unclear. To investigate the contention that shaking alone can elicit the injuries observed, effective computational models are necessary. The aim of this study was to develop a probabilistic model describing infant head kinematics in AHT. A deterministic model incorporating an infant's mechanical properties, subjected to different shaking motions, was developed in OpenSim. A Monte Carlo analysis was used to simulate the range of infant kinematics produced as a result of varying both the mechanical properties and the type of shaking motions. By excluding physically unrealistic shaking motions, worst-case shaking scenarios were simulated and compared to existing injury criteria for a newborn, a 4.5 month-old, and a 12 month-old infant. In none of the three cases were head kinematics observed to exceed previously-estimated subdural haemorrhage injury thresholds. The results of this study provide no biomechanical evidence to demonstrate how shaking by a human alone can cause the injuries observed in AHT, suggesting either that additional factors, such as impact, are required, or that the current estimates of injury thresholds are incorrect.

Abusive head trauma (AHT) is a potentially fatal result of child abuse but the mechanisms of injury are controversial. To address the hypothesis that shaking alone is sufficient to elicit the injuries observed, effective computational and experimental models are necessary. This paper investigates the use of a coupled rigid-body computational modelling framework to reproduce in vivo shaking kinematics in AHT. A sagittal plane OpenSim computational model of a lamb was developed and used to interpret biomechanical data from in vivo shaking experiments. The acceleration of the head during shaking was used to provide in vivo validation of the associated computational model. Results of this study demonstrated that peak accelerations occurred when the head impacted the torso and produced acceleration magnitudes exceeding 200ms(-)(2). The computational model demonstrated good agreement with the experimental measurements and was shown to be able to reproduce the high accelerations that occur during impact. The biomechanical results obtained with the computational model demonstrate the utility of using a coupled rigid-body modelling framework to describe infant head kinematics in AHT., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)