Correlation Between the Revised Trauma Score and Injury Severity Score: Implications for Prehospital Trauma Triage

Abstract

While elements of the RTS remain the first criterion recommended to quantify the totality of physiological injury severity, the composite RTS score derived from this system correlates poorly with actual anatomical injury severity. The MGAP scoring system demonstrated higher sensitivity and specificity for mortality but was not superior to the RTS for predicting anatomical injury severity. In the future development of national and international field triage guidelines for trauma patients, the findings from this study may be considered in order to improve the accuracy of prehospital triage. The findings in this analysis complement a growing body of evidence that suggests that MGAP may be a superior and more easily calculable prehospital scoring system for the prediction of mortality in trauma patients.