Citation

Baum AS. Proc. Am. Assoc. Automot. Med. Annu. Conf. 1978; 22(1): 210-220.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1978, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

It is well known that researchers have been limited to a large extent by the use of the K-A-B-C injury code as an estimate of injury severity. As a result, the New York State Injury Coding Scheme (NYSICS) was developed. The code consists of three components: the location of the victim's severest injury, its type, and the victim's physical/emotional status. This study evaluated the NYSICS as an alternative to the K-A-B-C injury scale. The assessment was based on data from 18,228 occupants, who were involved in accidents investigated by Calspan in 1974; the data set included 2,027 documented injuries. Several different analyses were performed on the data, including (i) the frequencies of omitted and incomplete codings by the police, (ii) a component-by- component examination of error patterns between coded and actual injuries, and (iii) an estimation of the ability of the NYSICS to predict the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) rating of the actual injury. The latter analysis utilized the information theory concept of uncertainty as the measure of the NYSICS's predictive ability; this procedure was validated using rank-order correlational techniques. The study found that generally the police only neglected to complete all three components of the code in cases of extremely minor injuries or in ambiguous situations - for instance, similar abrasions to two different parts of the body. Furthermore, the police coding was fairly consistent with the medical reports, with the following exceptions: internal injuries often went undiagnosed, and contusions and fractures were frequently interchanged with one another, as were minor bleeding, contusions, and abrasions. It was concluded that the NYSICS was an improvement over the more traditional K-A-B-C injury scale in predicting AIS. Thus, it was recommended that the NYSICS - with some minor changes - be implemented in other areas.