When children suffer traumatic injury to the head, both clinician and parents have an inclination to test for clinically important traumatic brain injury (ciTBI). A provider has the option to recommend a computed tomography (CT) scan, which exposes the patient to ionizing radiation and is costly, or recommend observation, which carries the risk of not treating an emergency issue.
The current Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) rules use simple and easy to memorize rules to assess the likelihood of ciTBI.
ciTBI Calc provides updated versions of the PECARN rules based on a modern machine learning approach.