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Fantastic plastic? Experimental evaluation of polyurethane bone substitutes as proxies for human bone in trauma simulations.

Smith, M.J., James, S., Pover, T., Ball, N., Barnetson, V., Foster, B., Guy, C., Rickman, J. and Walton, V., 2015. Fantastic plastic? Experimental evaluation of polyurethane bone substitutes as proxies for human bone in trauma simulations. Legal Medicine, 17 (5), 427 - 435.

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DOI: 10.1016/j.legalmed.2015.06.007

Abstract

Recent years have seen steady improvements in the recognition and interpretation of violence related injuries in human skeletal remains. Such work has at times benefited from the involvement of biological anthropologists in forensic casework and has often relied upon comparison of documented examples with trauma observed in skeletal remains. In cases where no such example exists investigators must turn to experimentation. The selection of experimental samples is problematic as animal proxies may be too dissimilar to humans and human cadavers may be undesirable for a raft of reasons. The current article examines a third alternative in the form of polyurethane plates and spheres marketed as viable proxies for human bone in ballistic experiments. Through subjecting these samples to a range of impacts from both modern and archaic missile weapons it was established that such material generally responds similarly to bone on a broad, macroscopic scale but when examined in closer detail exhibits a range of dissimilarities that call for caution in extrapolating such results to real bone.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:1344-6223
Uncontrolled Keywords:Forensic Anthropology ; Gunshot ; Head injury ; Synthetic bone substitutes ; Trauma
Group:Faculty of Science & Technology
ID Code:22611
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:07 Oct 2015 09:32
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 13:53

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