A Method to Estimate Injury Medical Cost of Occupants in a Crash Test

In a laboratory crash test, the injuries of occupants, such as Head Injure Criterion (HIC), Nij, Combined Thorax Index (CTI) etc., can be obtained and transferred to the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS). The calculated AIS value usually represents the severity of injury and can be adopted to evaluate the safety of the test vehicle. However, the AIS cannot reflect the medical resources consumed due to various vehicles of different designs. This study presents a statistical method to estimate injury medical cost from the AIS value of an occupant in a crash test. A frontal impact case study is illustrated. Five steps are carried out as follows: 1. To link the following three Taiwan’s databases by the individual identification number: crash data reported by police officers, hospital data recorded in the health insurance database, and death database. 2. To calculate AIS values by the diagnosis ICD-9-CM code written by doctors for each individual case. 3. To develop a statistical model to estimate medical cost from massive crash cases obtained in steps 2. 4. To simulate crash test for obtaining the injuries of occupant by using a validated finite element simulation model of Hybrid III 50 percentile male dummy. The injuries of occupant are then converted to AIS values. 5. To estimate the probable medical cost by the statistical model using the predicted AIS values from the crash test simulation.