Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 28, 2026
A Bedside, Single Burr Hole Approach to Multimodality Monitoring in Severe Brain Injury
Published on: March 26, 2019
Clinician judgment vs formal scales for predicting intracerebral hemorrhage outcomes
David Y Hwang1, Cameron A Dell2, Mary J Sparks2
1From the Division of Neurocritical Care and Emergency Neurology (D.Y.H., K.N.S.), Department of Neurology, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; the Maryland Stroke Center (C.A.D., M.J.S., T.D.W.), Baltimore; the Center for Public Health Genomics and Department of Biostatistical Sciences (C.D.L., M.E.C.), Division of Public Health Sciences, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC; the Center for Human Genetic Research (J.R., T.W.K.B.), Boston, MA; the University of Miami (S.K., M.L.P.), Miller School of Medicine, FL; Duke University Medical Center (M.L.J., J.M.), Durham, NC; the Department of Neurology (J.L.O., D.W.), University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, OH; and the Baltimore Veterans Administration Medical Center and University of Maryland School of Medicine (S.J.K.). david.hwang@yale.edu.
Objective:
To compare the performance of formal prognostic instruments vs subjective clinical judgment with regards to predicting functional outcome in patients with spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH).
Methods:
This prospective observational study enrolled 121 ICH patients hospitalized at 5 US tertiary care centers. Within 24 hours of each patient's admission to the hospital, one physician and one nurse on each patient's clinical team were each asked to predict the patient's modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score at 3 months and to indicate whether he or she would recommend comfort measures. The admission ICH score and FUNC score, 2 prognostic scales selected for their common use in neurologic practice, were calculated for each patient. Spearman rank correlation coefficients (r) with respect to patients' actual 3-month mRS for the physician and nursing predictions were compared against the same correlation coefficients for the ICH score and FUNC score.
Results:
The absolute value of the correlation coefficient for physician predictions with respect to actual outcome (0.75) was higher than that of either the ICH score (0.62, p = 0.057) or the FUNC score (0.56, p = 0.01). The nursing predictions of outcome (r = 0.72) also trended towards an accuracy advantage over the ICH score (p = 0.09) and FUNC score (p = 0.03). In an analysis that excluded patients for whom comfort care was recommended, the 65 available attending physician predictions retained greater accuracy (r = 0.73) than either the ICH score (r = 0.50, p = 0.02) or the FUNC score (r = 0.42, p = 0.004).
Conclusions:
Early subjective clinical judgment of physicians correlates more closely with 3-month outcome after ICH than prognostic scales.
