Lurie Children's Hospital launches app to spot signs of child abuse

CHICAGO (CBS)-- Lurie Children's Hospital has launched an app aimed at recognizing signs of child abuse as April marks Child Abuse Prevention Month. 

The app, LCAST (Lurie Children's Child Injury Plausibility Assessment Support Tool), is designed to help screen for bruises in babies and children age 4 and younger. It's available in the Apple app store and Google Play and is free for anyone to download.  

The app was developed by Lurie Children's Emergency Medicine physician Mary Clyde Pierce, MD, and Senior Research Scientist Kim Kaczor. It focuses on bruises to identify early signs of abuse before an abuse-related fatality or near fatality.  

"We found that many children had these early warning signs of abuse, that things were going wrong way before they had their fatality, so we really became mission driven to help identify and help people recognize those bruises before the next injury occurs," said Dr. Pierce, "People are so used to thinking that bruises are nothing, we were able to show that certain bruises are highly predictive and help differentiate abuse from actual injury"  

Dr. Pierce says bruising caused by physical abuse is often overlooked or misdiagnosed as accidental. The LCAST app contains data driven by a tracker from the National Institutes of Health that looks at thousands of children and identifies differences between bruises and how they were caused.  

Although available to everyone, the app is intended for frontline workers who work with children like clinicians in Emergency Departments, paramedics, and social workers from the Department of Children and Family Services