Child abuse is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in young children and infants in the United States. Medical care providers, social services, and legal systems make critical decisions regarding injury and history plausibility daily. Injury plausibility judgments rely on evidence-based medicine, individualized experiences, and empirical data. A poor outcome may result if abuse is missed or an innocent family is accused, therefore evidence and science-based injury assessments are required. Although research in biomechanics has improved clinical understanding of injuries in children, much work is still required to develop a more scientific, rigorous approach to assessing injury causation. This article reviews key issues in child abuse and how injury biomechanics research may help improve accuracy in differentiating abuse from accidental events. Case-based biomechanical investigations, human surrogate, and computer modeling biomechanics research applied to child abuse injury are discussed. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of key research studies rather than on review or commentary articles. Limitations and future research needs are also reviewed.

中文翻译：

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伤害生物力学和虐待儿童。

虐待儿童是美国幼儿和婴儿发病和死亡的主要原因。医疗服务提供者，社会服务和法律制度每天都会就伤害和历史合理性做出重要决策。伤害的合理性判断依赖于循证医学，个性化的经验​​和经验数据。如果错过虐待或指控无辜家庭可能会导致不良结果，因此需要证据和基于科学的伤害评估。尽管生物力学方面的研究提高了对儿童伤害的临床认识，但仍需要大量工作来开发一种更科学，更严格的方法来评估伤害因果关系。本文回顾了虐待儿童中的关键问题，以及伤害生物力学研究如何帮助提高区分虐待与意外事件的准确性。讨论了基于案例的生物力学研究，人工替代和计算机模型生物力学研究应用于虐待儿童的伤害。本文的目的是提供关键研究的概述，而不是评论或评论文章。局限性和未来的研究需求也进行了审查。