Predicting Delayed Cerebral Ischemia with Quantified Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Blood Volume

Abstract

Background: The amount of blood detected on brain computed tomography scan is frequently used in prediction models for delayed cerebral ischemia (DCI) in patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH). These models, which include coarse grading scales to assess the amount of blood, have only moderate predictive value. Therefore, we aimed to develop a predictive model for DCI including automatically quantified total blood volume (TBV).

Methods: We included patients from a prospective aSAH registry. TBV was assessed with an automatic hemorrhage quantification algorithm. The outcome measure was clinical deterioration due to DCI. Clinical and radiologic variables were included in a logistic regression model. The final model was selected by bootstrapped backward selection and internally validated by assessing the optimism-corrected R² value, c-statistic, and calibration plot. The c-statistic of the TBV model was compared with models that used the (modified) Fisher scale instead.

Results: We included 369 patients. After backward selection, only TBV was included in the final model. The internally validated R² value was 6%, and the c-statistic was 0.64. The c-statistic of the TBV model was higher than both the Fisher scale model (0.56; P < 0.001) and the modified Fisher scale model (0.58; P < 0.05).

Conclusions: In our registry, only TBV independently predicted DCI. TBV discriminated better than the (modified) Fisher scale, but still had only moderate value for predicting DCI. Our findings suggest that other factors need to be identified to achieve better accuracy for predicting DCI.

Keywords: Delayed cerebral ischemia; Prediction model; Subarachnoid hemorrhage; Total blood volume.