Accurate anatomical location of war injuries: analysis of the Lebanon war fatal casualties and the proposition of new principles for the design of military personal armour system

Injury patterns of soldiers in the second Lebanon war

“…9,13,14,36,38 Different studies use diverse methodologies to describe rates of multiple injuries. In this study, the number of AIS anatomic regions injured averaged 2 per combatant, with rates differing widely between survivors, averaging 1.5 body regions per combatant, to 4.2 among fatalities.…”

“…11Y13 Those seriously injured in combat have often sustained their injuries through more than one mechanism and in multiple anatomic regions 8 or multiple injuries within one region. 14 Casualties with multiple injuries have been analyzed using a number of scoring systems, 4,15,16 mainly Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS, with its modifications) and Injury Severity Score (ISS). 17 While not without limitations, these tools can account for multiple injuries, thus allowing better comparisons regarding injury patterns, fatality rates, and medical effectiveness.…”

Clinical and post mortem analysis of combat neck injury used to inform a novel coverage of armour tool

“…The introduction of individual body armour has resulted in significant reductions in the incidence and severity of wounds sustained by soldiers on combat operations in the modern age [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. However there is a constant drive to develop novel methods of providing protection as well as to refine existing designs of body armour [9].…”

Prospective Computerised Surface Wound Mapping will Optimise Future Body Armour Design

“…SWM has been attempted intermittently by US authors in World War II ( Figure 1) [1] and Korea [2] as well as by Israeli authors in Lebanon at the end of the 20 th century [3,4]. Gofrit et al [3] used post-mortem records to plot the entry wounds on 164 Israeli soldiers killed in the Lebanon. Although an interesting picture of wound distribution was produced, their use of dermatomes to plot the locations made accurate determination of the location of individual entry points difficult.…”

“…Despite its obvious importance in the evaluation of the potential coverage of new or enhanced body armor designs [3][4][5][6], SWM has only recently gained mainstream acceptance [5][6]. In 2009 the US military began to undertake retrospective SWM of all injuries sustained by US forces, with an emphasis on penetrating explosively-driven projectiles [5].…”