Injury Severity Score ISS Calculator

Injury Severity Score ISS Explanation and Clinical Context The Injury Severity Score ISS is a standardized anatomical trauma severity scale widely used to quantify overall injury burden in patients with multiple trauma. It is derived from the Abbreviated Injury Scale AIS across six body regions which include head or neck face chest abdomen or pelvic contents extremities or pelvic girdle and external structures. Only the highest AIS value in each body region is used for calculation.

The three most severely injured regions are identified and each corresponding AIS value is squared and added to produce the ISS. The final score ranges from one to seventy five. An AIS value of six in any region automatically results in an ISS of seventy five which reflects unsurvivable injury.

ISS is strongly correlated with mortality morbidity transfusion requirements and overall clinical outcomes and is widely applied in trauma research triage benchmarking and trauma system quality evaluation. Values of sixteen or more typically indicate major trauma and predict the need for specialized trauma care.