Science To Aid Diagnosis
JOHN EDENS – The Southland Times
A researcher hopes to help pediatricians diagnose shaken baby syndrome by using physics and maths to better understand brain injuries.
Auckland Bioengineering Institute PhD student Tom Lintern was speaking at the Medical Sciences Congress in Queenstown yesterday.
Mr Lintern said the syndrome – often the subject of intense courtroom battles – was hard to diagnose. Often, shaken baby syndrome is difficult to diagnose or prove because there are few or no visible marks.
The idea of the research was to investigate what was happening using physics and bio-mechanics, and provide an objective technique to assess soft-tissue damage quantitatively, he said.
“They know shaking is no good.
“There are innocent reasons – people claims it’s abuse but it’s not, there are arguments about whether it’s shaking alone or whether there are other factors.
“This leads to debates in the courtroom,” he said.
A pattern of injuries was typically described as shaken baby syndrome – such as bleeding in the head or retinal damage – but research suggested other benign causes for such injuries.
Asthma or breathing difficulties, for example, could indirectly cause bleeding.
Auckland Bioengineering Institute associate professor Martyn Nash, Mr Lintern’s supervisor, said babies do not have developed neck muscles, which means their heads tend to flop around. Causes other than shaking could lead to the same symptoms as the controversial syndrome, he said.
His student said he planned to build an experimental dummy – similar to a crash test dummy.
Reported cases of shaken baby syndrome in New Zealand account for about 20 of every 100,000 births.
The research, if successful, could provide forensic paediatricians with a new objective tool to sit alongside symptom-based methods. It could also help provide a model to clarify and settle courtroom debate.
Source:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/news/4418332/Science-to-aid-diagnosis
Profile
Tom Lintern received a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Auckland in 2010.
He began studying towards a PhD at The Auckland Bioengineering Institute in 2010 and his project investigates brain injury mechanisms during motions associated with Shaken Baby Syndrome.
His research interests include decomposing head motions using instrumentation and analysing the resultant soft tissue deformations.
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