How do the Clearinghouse crash severity terms Fatal, Serious Injury, and Minor Injury relate to the KABCO injury scale?
The initial idea was to use a standard KABCO scale for the Clearinghouse, but the problem encountered was one that always affects the attempts to standardize or categorize study details in the Clearinghouse database. The issue is that authors can and do report the details of their CMFs in many different ways. For crash severity, authors have have been seen to report crash severity by KABCO, by MAIS, or simply by referring to “serious injury” and “minor injury”. Thus, the Clearinghouse uses the lowest common denominator. There is no one-to-one comparison with KABCO, but the best comparison is that “Fatal” is always equivalent to K, “Serious Injury” would generally be A and B injuries, and “Minor Injury” would generally be C injuries.
