Road Safety Trust (RST 65-3-2017) “Reducing Road Traffic Casualties through Improved Forensic Techniques and Vehicle Design (“RoaD”) - Final Report

The “RoaD” Pilot study, funded by the Road Safety Trust, poses the problem of investigating the feasibility of a Pedestrian Trauma Database (PTD) with the ultimate purpose of supporting A&E departments, the UK Police Force (UKPF), the Coronial process as well as manufacturers vehicle safety design. The initial project methodology was relying on reconstructing a large number of pedestrian collisions, using a detailed Human Body Model (HBM) and relate the HBM model organ trauma output to the real-world Post Mortem (PM) outcomes. Unfortunately, this methodology could not be implemented due to unexpected reduction of Police Force support staffing as well as a new procedure of for the courts. As such the project “RoaD” devised a new mathematical derivation of trauma severity, or Organ Trauma Model (OTM), that was tested against three available accident cases, for which the collision information as well as the PM were available. It was found that the OTM model had true potential to build the PTD and was superior to the current methods used in the scientific community. It was however also discovered that the HBM has some inherent limitations as they cannot simulate blood loss, prompting for future HBM developments. Thanks to the research from the “RoaD” team, a better understanding of the parameters influencing the trauma outcome of a pedestrian collisions have been highlighted. The “RoaD” Pilot Study concluded that a PTD could be created by coupling a mixture of HBM simulations with collision information for the NHS and WMAS databases to machine learning algorithms. A list of “Future Work” is provided in this report to address the next phase of this research. “RoaD” has led to the funding of two PhD research projects between Coventry University and the University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire (£225,000 total value, start January 2021), the publication of one journal article (with one being written), the creation of unique traumatology extraction post-processing computer programme, six dissemination presentations, interest from the mechanical engineering research department of the Politecnico de Torino (Italy) and the Universite Gustave Eiffel (France), as well the software consultants ARUP Solihull (UK) (HBM pre-processing) and CADLM (FR) who are programming Machine Learning tools.