Predicting Blunt Cerebrovascular Injury in Pediatric Trauma: Validation of the 'Utah Score'

Risk factors for blunt cerebrovascular injury (BCVI) may differ between children and adults, suggesting that children at low risk for BCVI after trauma receive unnecessary computed tomography angiography (CTA) and high-dose radiation. We previously developed a score for predicting pediatric BCVI based on retrospective cohort analysis. Our objective is to externally validate this prediction score with a retrospective multi-institutional cohort. We included patients who underwent CTA for traumatic cranial injury at four pediatric Level I trauma centers. Each patient in the validation cohort was scored using the “Utah Score” and classified as high or low risk. Before analysis, we defined a misclassification rate