The Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) is an anatomical-based coding system created by the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine to classify and describe the severity of

injuries Injury is physiological damage to the living tissue of any organism, whether in humans, in other animals, or in plants. Injuries can be caused in many ways, including mechanically with penetration by sharp objects such as teeth or with b ...

. It represents the threat to life associated with the injury rather than the comprehensive assessment of the severity of the injury. AIS is one of the most common anatomic scales for traumatic injuries.

History

The first version of the scale was published in 1969John D. States: The Abbreviated and the Comprehensive Research Injury Scales. In: STAPP Car Crash Journal. 13, Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc., New York 1969, ISSN 1532-8546, S. 282–294, LCCN 67-22372. with major updates in 1976, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1998, 2005, 2008 and 2015.

Scale

The score describes three aspects of the injury using seven numbers written as 12(34)(56).7 *Type *Location *Severity Each number signifies *1- body region *2- type of anatomical structure *3,4- specific anatomical structure *5,6- level *7- Severity of score

Severity

Abbreviated Injury Score-Code is on a scale of one to six, one being a minor injury and six being maximal (currently untreatable). An AIS-Code of 6 is not the arbitrary code for a deceased patient or fatal injury, but the code for injuries specifically assigned an AIS 6 severity. An AIS-Code of 9 is used to describe injuries for which not enough information is available for more detailed coding, e.g. crush injury to the

head A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple ani ...

. The AIS scale is a measurement tool for single injuries. A universally accepted injury aggregation function has not yet been proposed, though the

injury severity score The Injury Severity Score (ISS) is an established medical score to assess trauma severity. It correlates with mortality, morbidity and hospitalization time after trauma. It is used to define the term major trauma. A major trauma (or polytrauma) is ...

and its derivatives are better aggregators for use in clinical settings. In other settings such as automotive design and occupant protection, MAIS is a useful tool for the comparison of specific injuries and their relative severity and the changes in those frequencies that may result from evolving motor vehicle design.

Usage in the European Union

The

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

defined the MAIS3+ as the maximum abbreviated injury scale (MAIS) with a score of 3 or more. The definition was used to harmonize count of serious injuries or serious road injury in different member States (see Killed or Seriously Injured). Since 2017 Valletta Council conclusions on road safety, States started collecting those numbers. This need use of hospital data rather than police data.European Commission (2021) Road safety thematic report – Serious injuries. European Road Safety Observatory. Brussels, European Commission, Directorate General for Transport. https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-01/Road%20Safety%20thematic%20report%20Serious%20injuries_final.pdf Those data can be computed in three different ways: # with a link between police and hospital data; # reporting injuries from hospitals; # using police data with a corrective coefficient computed from samples Previously each State had a different definition of a serious injury. It has been estimated that 110,000 people were seriously injured in traffic collisions on the roads of European Union member States in 2019, based on MAIS3+ definition. In 2018, some Eastern European countries do not provide data. When data is available, the breakdown attributes 19 thousandths to Italy, 16 to France, 15 to Germany, 7 to the Netherlands, 5 to Spain, 3 to Belgium, 3 to Czechia, 2 to Portugal, 1 to Austria, and less than one thousands for each other countries. However, these data are computed with different methods in each country. One reason is that medical diagnoses are often coded with the WHO’s

International Classification of Diseases The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a globally used medical classification that is used in epidemiology, health management and clinical diagnosis. The ICD is maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is the dir ...

(ICD). Also, Italy uses ICD-9 and other countries use ICD-10.https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download/e064d1a6-fc33-4e67-8c0d-650fc91ced85_en?filename=ff_serious_injuries_20230303.pdf

References

External links