National Highway Traffic Safety Administration August 2, 2011 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

This notice announces the Nineteenth Public Meeting of members of the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network. CIREN is a collaborative effort to conduct research on crashes and injuries at six Level I Trauma Centers across the United States linked by a computer network. The current CIREN model utilizes two types of centers, medical and engineering. Medical centers are based at Level I Trauma Centers that admit large numbers of people injured in motor vehicle crashes. These teams are led by trauma surgeons and emergency physicians and also include a crash investigator and project coordinator. Engineering centers are based at academic engineering laboratories that have experience in motor vehicle crash and human injury research. Engineering teams partner with trauma centers to enroll crash victims into the CIREN program. Engineering teams are led by mechanical engineers, typically trained in the area of impact biomechanics. Engineering teams also include trauma/emergency physicians, a crash investigator, and a project coordinator. Either type of team typically includes additional physicians and/or engineers, epidemiologists, nurses, and other researchers. The CIREN process combines prospective data collection with professional multidisciplinary analysis of medical and engineering evidence to determine injury causation in every crash investigation conducted. Researchers can review data and share expertise, which may lead to a better understanding of crash injury mechanisms and the design of safer vehicles. The six centers will give presentations on current research based on CIREN data. Topics include side air bag analysis utilizing CIREN weighted data; the role of frailty in crash related injuries; fatalities and serious injuries in multiple event rollover crashes; validation of prehospital trauma triage: mechanism of injury; small overlap frontal crashes and injury causation; and brain injury analysis. The final agenda will be posted to the CIREN Web site that can be accessed by going to the NHTSA homepage https:// www.nhtsa.dot.gov/, click on Vehicle Safety Research on the right side of the top toolbar, then click on Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) in the box on the left. The agenda will be posted one week prior to the meeting.