Establishing Decision Trees for Predicting Successful Postpyloric Nasoenteric Tube Placement in Critically Ill Patients.

Background: Despite the use of prokinetic agents, the overall success rate for postpyloric placement via a self-propelled spiral nasoenteric tube is quite low. Methods: This retrospective study was conducted in the intensive care units of 11 university hospitals from 2006 to 2016 among adult patients who underwent self-propelled spiral nasoenteric tube insertion. Success was defined as postpyloric nasoenteric tube placement confirmed by abdominal x-ray scan 24 hours after tube insertion. Chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID), simple classification and regression trees (SimpleCart), and J48 methodologies were used to develop decision tree models, and multiple logistic regression (LR) methodology was used to develop an LR model for predicting successful postpyloric nasoenteric tube placement. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to evaluate the performance of these models. Results: Successful postpyloric nasoenteric tube placement was confirmed in 427 of 939...