To avoid false positives, daily internal control dosage are performed, and in case of a patient with elevated concentration of a substance (in absence of a known addiction), the analysis is repeated Moreover, on scene drugs are recorded,

as well as first aid medical treatments. The impact of road accident dynamics and lesions on the outcome are studied by recording length of stay, PF-01367338 supplier mortality at 6 months, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and the follow-up program at 6 months on the ICU database. As an indicator of the quality of life recovered at 6 months after the event (follow-up at 6 months) the Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) [38] is used, as well as the questionnaire EuroQol5 EQ5-D with scale EQ5-D-VAS [39], which includes a medical examination. In case a patient cannot sustain a medical visit, a telephone interview is performed. Patient pre-accident drug treatment and pre-existing medical conditions seem to correlate with worse outcome, in terms of complication, ICU and Hospital length of stay, and lower functional Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical outcome [40-43]. For this reason these data are recorded in a dedicated section of the database

that includes the type and number of pre-existing medical conditions, and the type and dosage of each drug (ethanol, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine, benzodiazepine, barbiturate, opioids). Despite some limitations due to risk related to ionizing radiation, CT remains Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the most sensitive imaging exam to assess trauma lesions [44-47]: for this reason for head, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical neck, face, chest and abdomen CT slices are chosen. In addition to the encoding of each lesion using the AIS code, these are identified by means of a three-dimensional localization tool that uses a discretization of the human body based on a set of CT slices equipped with an active matrix (Figure 7). Figure 7 Graphical method for the active injuries’ localization. This was done by dividing a human body not affected by clinical pathologies

through cross sections of CT scan made at regular intervals in the sagittal plane (z axis). Each slice (or plane) is divided into a point’s matrix. In this way, each point has its Cartesian Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical coordinate (x, y, z) fixed, where x and y are read in the transverse Phosphoprotein phosphatase plane (CT slice) while the z coordinate is the height of the CT slice, with zero value at top of the head. The matrix dimension depends on of the size of the section. The body regions head-face, neck, thorax, and abdomen are divided, respectively, into 8, 3, 15 and 13 slices. For the facial bones, vertebrae, rib cage, pelvis, and limbs, an active matrix built on the anatomical atlas figure is used to localize lesions with more sensitivity. This type of localization of the lesions, for example, provides a means to compare the distribution of the damage (in terms of extent of the lesion) among different people, or even to realize the frequency distributions of the damage (mean and standard deviation) relative to a certain region of the body.