A comparative study of the risk stratification models for pediatric cardiac surgery

Abstract Objective The objective of the study was to compare Risk Assessment for Congenital Heart Surgery (RACHS-1), Aristotle Basic Complexity (ABC) and Society of Thoracic Surgeons – European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery (STS-EACTS) complexity scoring models for predicting outcome after surgery for congenital heart disease. Methods This retrospective study included children Results The study included 920 patients. All 3 models showed good fit for both prolonged ICU stay and mortality on calibration. STS-EACTS outclassed RACHS-1 and ABC models with AUC of 0.759 for prolonged PLOS and 0.870 for hospital mortality. AUC of ROC curve for STS-EACTS was significantly higher than RACHS-1 model for both prolonged PLOS (p – 0.046) and hospital mortality (p – 0.015). No significant difference was observed between the AUC of ROC curves of other models. Conclusion Risk stratification for pediatric heart surgery is a useful tool to predict the outcome. STS-EACTS risk stratification model has the best discriminative power.