Introduction

Despite of being a sensitive matter, the focus and knowledge that should be dispersed for the burn injury is very low. There are very few centers dedicated to take care of these victims. The first thing that the treating doctor gets to face from the visitor is the survival rate of such victims. Not just to answer this question, but even managing the patients, multiple scoring systems have been created for predicting the mortality rate of such burn victims. One amongst them which is frequently used to predict the survival rate of the burn victims is the abbreviated burn severity index score abbreviated as ABSI.

Tobiasen et al. in 1982 AD created this scoring system. Though there are just 5 parameters with 21 findings to remember; it takes a bit long learning curve to remember for the beginners. I too had faced difficulty to memorize thus to ease it, I had developed my own way to remember which I found a bit easier. Thus, I am here to share it to you.

The scoring system can be seen in the Table 1.

After remembering the mentioned parameters in Table 1, we again have to memorize another table with the total score and prediction part which is depicted in Table 2.

Table 1: Scoring system.

Table 2: Prediction part.

The scoring system though is simple, no one can instantly memorize it. But there is really a very easy way to memorize it. By now, we know that the scoring system ABSI has 5 param- eters. A is the first letter of English alphabet and B is the second one, thus the 1^st has one parameter and 2^nd has 2 parameters. Now we have left 2 more parameters.

The abbreviated form can be converted as the pneumonic to remember the scoring system. A stands for Age, B stands for burn depth and burn percentage, S stands for Sex and I stands for Inhalation injury.

The findings and distribution of the point of each parameter can then be memorized in the following way:

Age: Regroup in the range of 20 from 0 to 100 years and add a point in each group.

Burn depth: Absence or Presence of deep burn marks either 0 or 1 score.

Burn percentage: Regroup in the range of 10 with adding a point in each group.

Sex: Male or Female accounts either 0 or 1 score.

Inhalatation injury: Absence or Presence accounts either 0 or 1 score.

Now looking back at the Table 1, the parameters and points, I hope, can easily be memorized.

Coming to the (Table 2) or table of prediction; what we can do is, we can recall the numbers from ZERO (0) to DOZEN (12). Starting from zero, we can sub-group the 2 consequetive numbers and row them serially. The first row containing the 0 and 1 can be discarded as the survival rate is 100%. The remaining rows can easily memorized then after as there are just 6 rows with few numbers to remember.