Solid Organ Injury Grading in the Abdomen: A Primer for Emergency Radiology

The American Association for the Surgery of Trauma (AAST) established the Organ Injury Scale (OIS) in 1984, making an initial revision in 1994, and the most recent revision in 2018. This recent revision was made to better predict the need for operative or angiointervention management, considering active hemorrhage or other vascular complications. Diagnosis of hemodynamically stable patients is made by CT; however, hemodynamically unstable patients may be diagnosed via focused assessment with sonography in trauma (FAST) ultrasound or emergency laparotomy.1–3 In this article, we discuss in depth the different OIS gradings for renal, hepatic, and splenic trauma and demonstrate the necessary information that an emergency radiologist must know through a series of cases. This knowledge will allow radiologists to concisely communicate with referring teams and help them make the appropriate management decisions for each patient case.1,4