ABSTRACT
ObjectivesTo present a model that enhances the accuracy of clinicians when presented with a possibly critical Covid-19 patient. MethodsA retrospective study was performed with information of 5,745 SARS-CoV2 infected patients admitted to the Emergency room of 4 public Hospitals in Madrid belonging to Quiron Salud Health Group (QS) from March 2020 to February 2021. Demographics, clinical variables on admission, laboratory markers and therapeutic interventions were extracted from Electronic Clinical Records. Traits related to mortality were found through difference in means testing and through feature selection by learning multiple classification trees with random initialization and selecting the ones that were used the most. We validated the model through cross-validation and tested generalization with an external dataset from 4 hospitals belonging to Sanitas Hospitals Health Group. The usefulness of two different models in real cases was tested by measuring the effect of exposure to the model decision on the accuracy of medical professionals. ResultsOf the 5,745 admitted patients, 1,173 died. Of the 110 variables in the dataset, 34 were found to be related with our definition of criticality (death in <72 hours) or all-cause mortality. The models had an accuracy of 85% and a sensitivity of 50% averaged through 5-fold cross validation. Similar results were found when validating with data from the 4 hospitals from Sanitas. The models were found to have 11% better accuracy than doctors at classifying critical cases and improved accuracy of doctors by 12% for non-critical patients, reducing the cost of mistakes made by 17%.
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: Submandibular gland excision is the treatment of choice in chronic pathology resistant to medical treatments or in oncological cases. The aim of this study was to analyse its current postoperative complications. MATERIAL & METHODS: Retrospective study on submandibular gland excisions performed at our University Hospital between 2004 and 2010. RESULTS: A total of 29 submandibular gland excisions were performed: 44.8% (13) for chronic sialadenitis, 37.9% (11) for salivary gland neoplasm and 17.2% (5) for adjacent tumours. Median length of hospital stay was 2 days. Complications were more common after gland excision due to inflammatory causes. There were only 2 cases of paralysis of the marginal facial nerve branch (6.8%); 1 was due to neoplastic pathology and 1, from inflammatory pathology. CONCLUSION: Despite marginal facial nerve paresis being one of the most relevant issues after submandibular gland excision, this type of surgery is a safe technique in our experience.
