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

• Synthetic bones offer alternatives to animal or human remains in trauma experiments.
• We test polyurethane bone proxies in relation to three modes of ballistic trauma.
• Polyurethane spheres respond to impacts in ways that are broadly similar to bone.
• On a detailed level these proxies are less useful.
• Their uniformity makes them potentially better than real bone in trauma simulations.

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.

Figure optionsDownload high-quality image (308 K)Download as PowerPoint slide