Development of a clinical prediction rule for patients with cervical spinal cord injury who have difficulty in obtaining independent living.

Abstract Background context A simple and easy to use clinical prediction rule (CPR) to detect patients with a cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) who would have difficulty in obtaining independent living status is vital for providing the optimal rehabilitation and education in both care recipients and caregivers. A machine learning approach was recently applied to the field of rehabilitation and has the possibility to develop an accurate and useful CPR. Purpose The aim of this study was to develop and assess a CPR using a decision tree algorithm for predicting which patients with a cervical SCI would have difficulty in obtaining an independent living. Study design The present study was a cohort study. Patient sample In the present study, the data was obtained from the nationwide Japan Rehabilitation Database (JRD). The data on the SCIs was collected from 10 hospitals and the data was collected from the registries obtained between 2005 and 2015. The severity of SCI can vary, and patient prognosis differs depending on the damage site. In this study, the patients with cervical SCI were included. Outcome measures In this study, the degree of the independent living at discharge was investigated. The degree of the independent living was classified and listed as below: independent in social, independent at home, need care at home, independent at facility, need care at facility. In this study, the independent in social and independent at home were defined as “independent,” and the other situations were defined as “non-independent.” Methods We performed a classification and regression tree (CART) analysis to develop the CPR to predict whether the cervical SCI patients obtain an independent living at discharge. The area under the curve (AUC), the classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value (PPV) were used for model evaluation. Results A total of 4181 patients with SCI were registered in the JRD and the CART analysis was performed for 1282 patients with the cervical SCI. The Functional Independence Measure (FIM) total score and the American Spinal Injury Association impairment scale were identified as the first and second discriminators for predicting the degree of the independence, respectively. Subsequently, the CART model identified FIM eating, the residual function level, and the FIM bed to chair transfer as next discriminators. Each parameter for evaluating the CART model were the AUC 0.813, the classification accuracy 78.6%, the sensitivity 80.7%, the specificity 75.1%, and the PPV 84.5%. Conclusions In this study, we developed a clinically useful CPR with moderate accuracy to predict whether the cervical SCI patients obtain independent living at the discharge.