An anatomical index in blunt trauma

The case histories of 2,135 patients with acute blunt trauma, consecutively admitted to a hospital over a 48-month period, were studied in an attempt to produce an objective scale for the severity of injury. All injuries were coded using the Hospital Adaptation of International Classification of Disease (H-ICDA) prior to computer analysis. An effective probability of survival for each injury code was tested for its ability to predict outcome on random subsets of patients. When used as an injury score the PE1 can predict survival rates to within +-6% with individual misclassification rates of 12%.