The Human Lumbar Spine During High-Rate Under Seat Loading: A Combined Metric Injury Criteria

Modern changes in warfare have shown an increased incidence of lumbar spine injuries caused by underbody blast events. The susceptibility of the lumbar spine during these scenarios could be exacerbated by coupled moments that act with the rapid compressive force depending on the occupant's seated posture. In this study, a combined loading lumbar spine vertebral body fracture injury criteria (L-ic) across a range of postures was established from 75 tests performed on instrumented cadaveric lumbar spine specimens. The spines were predominantly exposed to axial compressive forces from an upward vertical thrust with 64 of the tests resulting in at least one vertebral body fracture and 11 in no vertebral body injury. The proposed L-ic utilizes a recommended metric (kappa), based on prismatic beam failure theory, resulting from the combination of the T12-L1 resultant sagittal force and the decorrelated bending moment with optimized critical values of F-r,F-crit = 5824 N and M-y,M-crit = 1155 Nm. The 50% risk of lumbar spine injury corresponded to a combined metric of 1, with the risk decreasing with the combined metric value. At 50% injury risk the Normalized Confidence Interval Size improved from 0.24 of a force-based injury reference curve to 0.17 for the combined loading metric.

Automated summary

Modern warfare has seen an increase in lumbar spine injuries caused by underbody blast events, with a study establishing injury criteria and metrics based on seated posture to reduce the risk of such injuries.