Abstract
More than 30% of total car accidents involved rear-end collisions, and minor neck injuries account for 90% of these injuries. Whiplash Associated Disorders (WAD) is one kind of minor neck injury. WAD causes giddiness and shoulder stiffness, and symptoms tend to become chronic and lasting, however the mechanism is unknown. The previous study indicated that the whole spine alignment affects mechanism of WAD. Therefore, it is important to obtain accurate whole spine alignment for WAD study. However, because of the difficulty of capturing the whole spine alignment, alignment patterns of occupant are unknown. The objective of this study is to analyze and categorize the spinal alignment patterns of the occupant and estimate the representative spine alignment of each pattern by using the upright open MRI data. The whole spine alignment MRI data of 15 volunteers were analyzed using Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS) method, and classified with the spine alignment patterns. The representative alignments on the 50% probability ellipsoid on the distribution map were reconstructed by using shape composition method.
