**Abstract**

Trauma resuscitation is a blend of art and science, with the traumatologist at the helm of a large, multidisciplinary team, making split-second decisions and overseeing various parallel processes. Despite tremendous progress over the past few decades, the "art" component continues to play a large part in the overall trauma resuscitation process, with the "science" part slowly but steadily increasing its footprint as a determinant of processes and decisions. Thus, it becomes critical for all clinicians to be able to recognize the evidence-based factors which can be most valuable in guiding trauma resuscitations. This chapter serves as an overview of the current clinical findings, resuscitative endpoints, imaging techniques, and physiologic indices that are most helpful in order to promptly recognize and treat traumatic shock as well as projecting forward to look at novel techniques and biomarkers. Though a single universal marker that accurately and consistently identifies traumatic shock has yet to be discovered, certain factors discussed, such as lactate and base deficit, have been proven to be much more reliable than others.

**Keywords:** traumatic shock, trauma resuscitation, resuscitative endpoints, imaging techniques, biomarkers in shock
