Historical vehicle safety analysis in the United States leans heavily on public datasets to determine factors leading to crash fatality. The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) is one such database collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) documenting all vehicle fatalities in the United States since 1975. The FARS dataset is used to inform safety decisions at the local, state and national levels, and provides key insights into the efficacy of changing vehicle and trafficway safety standards (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2022). The FARS dataset is frequently used by vehicle safety researchers to track long-term trends in fatality outcomes. As the FARS data have evolved over time, the variable coding has changed, sometimes dramatically, in some cases making it difficult to compare and analyze data across decades.

Cavitation has been shown to have implications for head injury, but currently there is no solution for detecting the formation of cavitation through the skull during blunt impact. The goal of this communication is to confirm the wideband acoustic wavelet signature of cavitation collapse, and determine that this signature can be differentiated from the noise of a blunt impact. A controlled, laser induced cavitation study was conducted in an isolated water tank to confirm the wide band acoustic signature of cavitation collapse in the absence of a blunt impact. A clear acrylic surrogate head was impacted to induce blunt impact cavitation. The bubble formation was imaged using a high speed camera, and the collapse was synched up with the wavelet transform of the acoustic emission. Wideband acoustic response is seen in wavelet transform of positive laser induced cavitation tests, but absent in laser induced negative controls. Clear acrylic surrogate tests showed the wideband acoustic wavelet signature of collapse can be differentiated from acoustic noise generated by a blunt impact. Broadband acoustic signal can be used as a biomarker to detect the incidence of cavitation through the skull as it consists of frequencies that are low enough to potentially pass through the skull but high enough to differentiate from blunt impact noise. This lays the foundation for a vital tool to conduct CSF cavitation research in-vivo.