A Statistical Prediction Model for Survival After Kidney Transplantation from Deceased Donors

BACKGROUND In an environment of limited kidney donation resources, patient recovery and survival after kidney transplantation (KT) are highly important. We used pre-operative data of kidney recipients to build a statistical model for predicting survivability after kidney transplantation. MATERIAL AND METHODS A dataset was constructed from a pool of patients who received a first KT in our hospital. For allogeneic transplantation, all donated kidneys were collected from deceased donors. Logistic regression analysis was used to change continuous variables into dichotomous ones through the creation of appropriate cut-off values. A regression model based on the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm was used for dimensionality reduction, feature selection, and survivability prediction. We used receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, calibration, and decision curve analysis (DCA) to evaluate the performance and clinical impact of the proposed model. Finally, a 10-fold cross-validation scheme was implemented to verify the model robustness. RESULTS We identified 22 potential variables from which 30 features were selected as survivability predictors. The model established based on the LASSO regression algorithm had shown discrimination with an area under curve (AUC) value of 0.690 (95% confidence interval: 0.557-0.823) and good calibration result. DCA demonstrated clinical applicability of the prognostic model when the intervention progressed to the possibility threshold of 2%. An average AUC value of 0.691 was obtained on the validation data. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that the proposed model can predict the mortality risk for patients after kidney transplants and could help kidney specialists choose kidney recipients with better prognosis.