A new weighted injury severity scoring system: better predictive power for adult trauma mortality

BACKGROUND: An accurate injury severity measurement is essential in the evaluation of trauma care and in outcome research. The traditional Injury Severity Score (ISS) does not consider the differential risks of the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) from different body regions, and the three AIS involved in the calculation of ISS are given equal weights. The objective of this study was to develop a weighted injury severity scoring (wISS) system for adult trauma patients with better predictive power than the traditional Injury Severity Score (ISS). METHODS: The 2007–2014 National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) Research Datasets were used. We identified adult trauma patients from the NTDB and then randomly split it into a study sample and a test sample. Based on the association between mortality and the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) from each of the six ISS body regions in the study sample, we evaluated 12 different sets of weights for the component AIS scores used in the calculation of ISS and selected one best set of weights. Discrimination (areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, concordance) and calibration were compared between the wISS and ISS. RESULTS: The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves from the wISS and ISS are all 0.83, and 0.76 vs. 0.73 for patients with ISS = 16–74 and 0.68 vs. 0.53 for patients with ISS = 25–74. The wISS showed higher specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and concordance when they were compared at similar levels of sensitivity. The wISS had better calibration than the ISS. CONCLUSIONS: By weighting the AIS from different body regions, the wISS had significantly better predictive power for mortality than the ISS, especially in critically injured adults. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s40621-019-0217-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.