ICD-10 Framework: Injury Mortality Diagnosis Matrix

The ICD-10 Injury Mortality Diagnosis (IMD) matrix is a framework designed to organize injury diagnosis mortality data into meaningful groupings by body region and nature of injury. Injury diagnoses describe the body region and nature of the injury mentioned on the death certificate that are the injuries sustained as a result of the underlying external cause of injury death. The IMD matrix was developed to be as similar to the Barell matrix as possible acknowledging the differences in data quality and coding systems.

At its most detailed level, the ICD-10 IMD has 20 nature of injury categories and 43 body region categories. The detailed structure can be readily collapsed into a more meaningful matrix for mortality using 16 nature-of-injury diagnosis categories and 17 body region of injury diagnosis categories. Categories for both axes were combined based on characteristics of the body region (e.g., foot and ankle injuries are part of “Other lower extremities”) as well as the number of injury diagnoses mentioned in a category (e.g. if there were too few). The latter was generally a reflection of the low lethality of the diagnosis (sprains and strains, for example).

SAS Input Statements
The link to the documents provides the SAS codes to produce Injury Mortality Diagnosis (IMD) matrix by body region and nature of injury using ICD-10 codes.

ICD-10 Codes for the Matrix [PDF - 65 KB]
This .pdf displays the codes in each of the ICD-10 IMD matrix cells using the 17 body region categories by the 16 nature of injury categories. The figure is excerpted from the Deaths: Injuries, 2002 [PDF - 4.7 MB], National Vital Statistics Report.

Number of Injury Diagnosis Mentions; US, 2002 [PDF - 262 KB]
This .pdf contains the total number of mentions of injury diagnoses in each cell of the matrix.

Detailed ICD-10 Code Listing For All Injury Diagnosis Codes
This ExcelTM spreadsheet contains each of the ICD-10 injury diagnosis codes for the complete 20x43 IMD matrix.

L.A. Fingerhut and M. Warner, The ICD-10 Injury Mortality Diagnosis Matrix, Injury Prevention, 2006;12;24-29