Annals of emergency medicine
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Multicenter Study Comparative Study
The Canadian C-spine rule performs better than unstructured physician judgment.
We compare the predictive accuracy of emergency physicians' unstructured clinical judgment to the Canadian C-Spine rule. ⋯ Interobserver agreement of unstructured clinical judgment for predicting clinically important cervical spine injury is only fair, and the sensitivity is unacceptably low. The Canadian C-Spine rule was better at detecting clinically important injuries with a sensitivity of 100%. Prospective validation has recently been completed and should permit widespread use of the Canadian C-Spine rule.