From the classroom to the emergency room, O-R and beyond.

You're joining trauma ICU rounds with your host, Dr. Dennis Kim.

Welcome back to rounds. I'm your host, Dr. Dennis Kim.

Continuing along with our airway and breathing theme, today I wanted to ship gears

and discuss a trauma related topic,

specifically the deadly dozen of thoracic trauma. Now it's no secret that injuries to the chest

are very common and that the vast majority can be definitively treated without the need for

surgery. In fact, only about 10 to 15% of patients with thoracic injuries will require operative intervention, and typically

a chest tube is all that's needed or as aggressive as we need to get.

So using an anatomic approach, we're going to first identify these clinical conditions or

injuries, and second, categorize them as being either lethal injuries, meaning injuries we must identify

during the course of our primary survey or our patients may die or non-lethal slash hidden injuries.

Non-lethal in the sense that they're not going to kill our patients immediately or, if not

identified during the first five minutes of our assessment, and hidden in the

sense that we need to perform some other adjunct, be it a chest x-ray or CT to make the diagnosis.

Just to put a disclaimer out there, this is meant to be an overview of thoracic trauma.

In future rounds, we'll do a dedicated, deeper dive into the mechanisms, presentation, diagnosis,

and management of patients with specific thoracic injuries. So we have three key objectives

for today's rounds. Number one, I'm going to provide you with a brief overview of the initial

assessment and management of the trauma patient. Our second objective is going to be to apply an

anatomica-based approach to identifying the 12 most common thoracic injuries that we'll see in the

trauma bay. Finally, by the end of rounds, you should have gained a deeper appreciation for the

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