Ocular Injuries Due To Projectile Impacts

Authors

Dr. William R. “Mike” Scott, Dr. William C. Lloyd III, Dr. James V. Benedict, Mr. Roy E. Meredith

Publication

Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference for the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. October 2-4, 2000. Chicago, IL. 2000:205-217.

Abstract

An animal model has been developed using enucleated porcine eyes to evaluate ocular trauma. The eyes were pressurized to approximately I8rnmHg and mounted in a container with a 10% gelatin mixture. The corneas of sixteen pressurized eyes were impacted by a blunt metal projectile (mass of 2.6gm, 3.5gm or 45.5gm) at velocities of 4.0 to 38.1 m/s. The impacted eyes were evaluated by an ophthalmologist. A numerical classification scheme was used to categorize the severity of the ocular injury. A chi-squared test indicates that the injury level is associated with the kinetic energy (KE) and not the momentum of the projectile. The enucleated eyes began to experience lens dislocations when the KE of the projectile was approximately 0.75Nnt and retinal injuries when the KE was approximately 1.20Nm.