Model for estimating the risk of postoperative morbidity and optimizing patients' management after hepatectomy.

BACKGROUND

Early detection of major complications and immediate therapeutic interventions may improve patient outcome after hepatectomy. The aim of the present study was to develop a model predicting the risk of postoperative complications after hepatectomy and help identify patients who require close-monitoring in intensive care unit (ICU).

METHODS

Patients underwent hepatectomy at Humanitas Research Hospital, Italy, between 2010 and 2021 were considered. We used preoperative, intraoperative and combined predictors to build three models predicting Clavien-Dindo III-V complications. Model performances was evaluated internally via bootstrapping.

RESULTS

Of 1497 patients, 7% had Clavien-Dindo III-V complications. Tumor pathology, tumor burden, previous chemotherapy, liver characteristics, clinical portal hypertension, cardiopathy, creatinine and total protein level were incorporated in the preoperative model. In addition to these variables, type of hepatectomy, operation time, additional surgical procedure, and transfusion were incorporated into the combined model. The bootstrap corrected C-indices for preoperative, intraoperative and combined models were 0.68, 0.70 and 0.72. The median predicted probability of major complications over-1000 bootstraps was close to observed probabilities for all models.

CONCLUSION

These prognostic models may help identify patients at high-risk of major complication and guide decision-making for individual patients and postoperative ICU-care assessment. Observed optimism in model performance necessitates external validation.