Pick your seat, pick your injury, pick your chance of survival

Cable news boasts about the in-depth coverage it provides. But I'm not sure that detailed explanations -- including charts and graphs -- of the type and severity of injuries likely to be suffered in a bus bombing really are necessary, unless the bus-riding public wants to pick its seats very carefully.

Here's CNN's color-coded presentation by Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

GUPTA: I think we have a picture, for example, of a specific schematic of a bus. What it looks like on a bus. This is from an actual bus that actually had an explosion. I don't know if we have that image, but they can actually predict to some degree of accuracy, based on where the explosion is within the bus, what the pattern of injuries are going to be and where those injuries are going to be.

Take a look at this, Soledad. The fact that this exists is sort of remarkable, but this is supposed to be a schematic of an actual bus. That sort of orange dot in the middle, that represents an explosion, an explosion site. The dark squares are people who died sitting in various places on the bus. Yellow are moderately injured, and orange squares are those with just light injuries. These are the sorts of extremes that you go to sort of figure out what happens in an explosion. But as you mentioned, Soledad, an enclosed space, such as a bus, such as underground, can be the most dramatic.

S. O'BRIEN: When you look at that schematic and you show the people who would not survive a blast, what are the dying of? Is it chest -- blunt chest trauma, things like that? What is it?

GUPTA: The two biggest things, really, are blunt chest trauma and head trauma. Those are the things that are going to most likely be the culprits in terms of unfortunatate immediate death. Take a look. This was a blast injury to the brain. You saw a concussive wave come there. It hits the brain. The brain actually goes back and forth.

I show you this to give you a sense that the brain is actually going back and forth in the skull and then subsequently has some swelling. The skull cannot take any swelling of the brain, so that's why someone would die in that sort of situation. In some studies coming out of Jerusalem, where suicide bomb -- from suicide bombers and some studies coming out of war-related situations, it's those types of head injuries that cause the most deaths, Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: And you know it's certainly terrible that they can look to war and they can look to other suicide bombings to get interesting research on these kinds of things. Sanjay, thanks. Appreciate it.