Influence of a soft tissue layer covering the kidney upon blunt impact

Blunt abdominal organ injury is an abundant and relevant topic in forensic medicine, yet comparatively few experimental studies have been performed to quantify organ injury threshold parameters. The goal of this study was to relate an impact to a kidney injury determining an energy threshold while taking account of the influence of the overlaying soft tissue thickness. A model consisting of ballistic gelatin with an embedded filled porcine kidney was made such that a gelatin layer of 2 or 4 cm thickness covered the organ. An impactor was dropped on this model from different heights and the resulting organ damage was categorized according to the abbreviated injury scale (AIS). The 50% energy threshold for damage and the 50% energy threshold causing injuries ≥ AIS 3 were determined for the two protecting soft layers to be 22 J and 32 J and 27 J and 36 J, respectively. A finite element model was created to determine the strain energy densities at the depth of the organ’s surface for these energies. The strain energy densities for the 50% damage thresholds were 88.9 mJ/cm³ and 86.7 mJ/cm³ for 2 and 4 cm and for the injuries ≥ AIS 3104.2 mJ/cm³ and 98.7 mJ/cm³. For forensic cases, this means that the thickness of the abdominal layers must be taken into account when the severity of an injury is used to draw conclusions about the applied impact strength.