The Coats lab received a $557K award from the Department of Justice for Phase 1 of their project to investigate the effect of skull thickness variability on skull fracture patterns in infant. This project, in collaboration with Dr. Ashley Spear from the Multiscale Mechanics and Materials Lab, will characterize skull thickness variability across the parietal, occipital, and frontal bones in a large dataset of infants. Thickness distributions will be incorporated into our existing computational framework to predict skull fracture patterns in infants. To prepare for more widespread use of the tools, Dr. Spear will will begin developing a machine learning algorithm that is capable of taking an image of the fracture and providing probabilities that the fractures occurred in low height falls.
