Accurate burn extent estimation: a common erroneous belief?

The determination of the extent of a burn injury is a complex process. To aid this process, plenty methods and tools have been developed. The aim of our work is to show, how accurate experts are able to estimate surfaces by using standard methods like “Palm-Rule”, “Rule-of-Nine”, “Lund-Browder chart”. We want to analyze the correlation of the results when multiple experts use those estimation methods. In our survey we asked attendants of several burn related international conferences. We provided a questionnaire with 3 pictures of burned patients where we highlighted the burned areas. We alsoTh asked about preferred estimation method and profession. Additionally, we provided graphical representations of the “Palm-Rule”, the “Rule-of-Nine” and a “Lund- Browder chart”. We had voluntary participants without financial payment. As we there is no way to exactly determine the surface areas, we have calculated the mean value of all attendants per patient as a basis for statistical variance …