The Trauma Score as applied to penetrating trauma

Abstract

The Trauma Score is a simple physiological measure of injury severity that has been shown to have a high correlation with mortality for blunt trauma patients. In this study, the Trauma Score was evaluated on two subsets of penetrating trauma patients. Results showed that the Trauma Score had a relative information gain of 0.83 and 0.87, an excellent rating in comparison with a possible perfect rating of 1.0. The Score had modest numbers of false negatives (13/64 for the design set, and 3/380 for the test set) and a low number of false positives (5/380 for the design set, and 3/380 for the test set). The Trauma Score is thus an accurate predictor of mortality for both blunt and penetrating trauma patients.