Abstract
Road safety is a major issue of public health and personal safety. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 1.2 million people die each year worldwide due to road accidents (2015). According to accident data, 36.7% of serious injuries are caused by thoracic injuries (Page et al., 2012). The aim of biomechanics in passive safety is to improve our understanding of the human body in order to build better tools for assessing the risk of injury.Numerical human body models are used to virtually simulate the conditions of an accident. Today, they are increasingly used by car manufacturers and equipment manufacturers to better understand injury mechanisms. However, they exist only in few sizes and do not take into account the morphological variations observed in the population.3D medical imaging gives access to the geometries of the different anatomical structures that make up the human body. Today, hospitals are full of 3D images covering a very large part of the population in terms of age, body size and sex.The overall objective of this thesis is to statistically model the 3D geometry of the rib cage from medical images in order to personalize a numerical human body model to simulate car crash conditions.The first objective is to develop a segmentation process based on CT-scans in order to obtain geometric data adapted to the construction of a statistical model of shape of the rib cage.The second objective is to build a statistical model of the shape of the rib cage, taking into account its articulated structure.The third objective is to use the statistical model of the rib cage to deform a numerical human body model, in order to study the influence of certain parameters on the risk of injury.