Feasibility of stone recurrence risk stratification using the recurrence of kidney stone (ROKS) nomogram

Abstract

This study seeks to evaluate the recurrence of kidney stones (ROKS) nomogram for risk stratification of recurrence in a retrospective study. To do this, we analyzed the performance of the 2018 ROKS nomogram in a case-control study of 200 patients (100 with and 100 without subsequent recurrence). All patients underwent kidney stone surgery between 2013 and 2015 and had at least 5 years of follow-up. We evaluated ROKS performance for prediction of recurrence at 2- and 5-year via area under the receiver operating curve (ROC-AUC). Specifically, we assessed the nomogram's potential for stratifying patients based on low or high risk of recurrence at: a) an optimized cutoff threshold (i.e., optimized for both sensitivity and specificity), and b) a sensitive cutoff threshold (i.e., high sensitivity (0.80) and low specificity). We found fair performance of the nomogram for recurrence prediction at 2 and 5 years (ROC-AUC of 0.67 and 0.63, respectively). At the optimized cutoff threshold, recurrence rates for the low and high-risk groups were 20 and 45% at 2 years, and 50 and 70% at 5 years, respectively. At the sensitive cutoff threshold, the corresponding recurrence rates for the low and high-risk groups were of 16 and 38% at 2 years, and 42 and 66% at 5 years, respectively. Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed a recurrence-free advantage between the groups for both cutoff thresholds (p < 0.01, Fig. 2). Therefore, we believe that the ROKS nomogram could facilitate risk stratification for stone recurrence and adherence to risk-based surveillance protocols.

Keywords: Kidney stone; Kidney stone recurrence; Risk stratification.