Search Results

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) National Accident Sampling System Crashworthiness Data System (NASS/CDS) collects detailed information on a sample of all police-reported motor vehicle crashes in the United States that involved passenger vehicles towed from the scene due to damage.[1] This system's occupant injury definitions and severity levels, which are based on the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine's (AAAM) Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS), are periodically updated. The last major revision, in 1993, changed the injury identifier of all injuries, added injuries, deleted injuries and changed the body region and severity of a substantial number of injuries.[1] These changes confound the direct combining or trending of pre-1993 and 1993 and later NASS data. This paper reports on the results of using a conversion method to equate pre-NASS-93 and NASS-93 and later injury descriptors and severities.