Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 16, 2025
An R-Based Landscape Validation of a Competing Risk Model
Published on: September 16, 2022
National Multi-Institutional Validation of a Surgical Transfusion Risk Prediction Model
Sunny S Lou1, Yaoming Liu2, Mark E Cohen2
1From the Department of Anesthesiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO (Lou, Kannampallil).
Background:
Accurate estimation of surgical transfusion risk is important for many aspects of surgical planning, yet few methods for estimating are available for estimating such risk. There is a need for reliable validated methods for transfusion risk stratification to support effective perioperative planning and resource stewardship.
Study Design:
This study was conducted using the American College of Surgeons NSQIP datafile from 2019. S-PATH performance was evaluated at each contributing hospital, with and without hospital-specific model tuning. Linear regression was used to assess the relationship between hospital characteristics and area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve.
Results:
A total of 1,000,927 surgical cases from 414 hospitals were evaluated. Aggregate AUROC was 0.910 (95% CI 0.904 to 0.916) without model tuning and 0.925 (95% CI 0.919 to 0.931) with model tuning. AUROC varied across individual hospitals (median 0.900, interquartile range 0.849 to 0.944), but no statistically significant relationships were found between hospital-level characteristics studied and model AUROC.
Conclusions:
S-PATH demonstrated excellent discriminative performance, although there was variation across hospitals that was not well-explained by hospital-level characteristics. These results highlight the S-PATH's viability as a generalizable surgical transfusion risk prediction tool.
