Center Accomplishments

The William Lehman Injury Research Center continues to make significant progress in all phases of injury research, resulting in improved treatment of car crash victims as well as the enhancement of safety features in vehicles, among other lifesaving benefits. Achievements include:

Side Impact Injuries

  • Discovered crash patterns that lead to aortic injuries in side impacts
  • Developed computer modeling to assists in predicting the conditions that cause aortic crashes
  • Published finding of injury patterns in both near-side and far-side impacts.

Occult Injuries

  • Discovery of new injury patterns in air bag crashes
  • Development of lift and look
  • Crash scene triage aid for air bag deployments
  • Discovery of pattern of potentially fatal, occult liver injuries in crashes with automatic belts (work without use of the manual lap belt)
  • Development of look beyond the obvious
  • National poster campaign to improve practices of triage, diagnoses, and treatment of occult crash injuries

Air Bag Injuries

  • Demonstrated low crash speed deployment problems (unbelted drivers of small stature.)
  • Identified hip injures associated with femur abduction in unbelted occupants.
  • Documented problems of unbelted occupants missing the air bag.
  • Provided extensive data analyses of air bag injuries by linking hospital and National Automotive Sampling System (NASS) files and New Car
  • Assessment program (NCAP) films.
  • Studies the performance of depowered air bags and reported the results to NHTSA, industry, consumer advocates, and congressional and White House staff.

Lower Extremity Injuries

  • Advanced the scientific understanding of lower extremity injuries, the associate crash forces and long-term impairment and disability.
  • Developed crash investigation methods and techniques to improve the study of injury causation.
  • Developed computer reconstruction techniques for determining the conditions that cause lower limb injuries.
  • Produced recommendation for improvement in data collection in the national Automotive Sampling System, in hospital studies, in crash tests (intrusion measurements) and in dummy instrumentation.
  • Injuries Among Elderly Occupants
  • Identified injury patterns among elderly occupants,
  • Published finding regarding the conditions that produce heart injuries among older occupants.