Development of a risk prediction model (Hangang) and comparison with clinical severity scores in burn patients

The purpose of this study was to develop a new prediction model to reflect the risk of mortality and severity of disease and to evaluate the ability of the developed model to predict mortality among adult burn patients.

This study included 2009 patients aged more than 18 years who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) within 24 hours after a burn. We divided the patients into two groups; those admitted from January 2007 to December 2013 were included in the derivation group and those admitted from January 2014 to September 2017 were included in the validation group. Shrinkage methods with 10-folds cross-validation were performed to identify variables and limit overfitting of the model. The discrimination was analyzed using the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic curve. The Brier score, integrated discrimination improvement (IDI), and net reclassification improvement (NRI) were also calculated. The calibration was analyzed using the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test (HL test). The clinical usefulness was evaluated using a decision-curve analysis.

The Hangang model showed good calibration with the HL test (χ2 = 8.785, p = 0.361); the highest AUC and the lowest Brier score were 0.943 and 0.068, respectively. The NRI and IDI were 0.124 (p-value = 0.003) and 0.079 (p-value <0.001) when compared with FLAMES, respectively.

This model reflects the current risk factors of mortality among adult burn patients. Furthermore, it was a highly discriminatory and well-calibrated model for the prediction of mortality in this cohort.