Personalised Predictions of Endovascular Aneurysm Repair Success Rates: Validating the ERA Model with UK Vascular Institute Data

Objective: The objective of this study was to externally validate the existing Australian Endovascular aneurysm repair Risk Assessment (ERA) Model using data from a major vascular centre in the United Kingdom. Methods: Data collected from 312 endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm repair patients at St George's Vascular Institute, London, UK were fitted to the ERA Model. Results: Despite St George's patients being sicker (p < 0.001), having larger aneurysms (p < 0.001) and being more likely to die (p < 0.05) than the Australian patients, their data fitted the ERA Model well for the risk factors early death, aneurysm-related death, three-year survival and type I endoleaks as evidenced by higher area under ROC curves and/or higher R-2 goodness of fit statistics than the Australian data. Conclusions: The first external validation of the ERA Model using data from St George's Vascular Institute suggests that this tool can be used in different countries and hospital settings. The authors believe the ERA Model is robust and allows valid personalised predictions of outcomes by surgeons treating routine aneurysms as well as those in tertiary referral practices with more adverse outcomes. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of European Society for Vascular Surgery.