Increased Short- and Long-term Mortality at Low-volume Pediatric Heart Transplant Centers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The relationship between volume and outcome in many complex surgical procedures is well established. BACKGROUND: No published data has examined this relationship in pediatric cardiac transplantation, but low-volume adult heart transplant programs seem to have higher early mortality. METHODS: The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) provided center-specific data for the 4647 transplants performed on patients younger than 19 years old, 1992 to 2007. Patients were stratified into 3 groups based on the volume of transplants performed in the previous 5 years at that center: low [<19 transplants, n = 1135 (24.4%)], medium [19–62 transplants, n = 2321(50.0%)], and high [≥63 transplants, n= 1191 (25.6%)]. A logistic regression model for postoperative mortality was developed and observed-to-expected (O:E) mortality rates calculated for each group. RESULTS: Unadjusted long-term survival decreased with decreasing center volume (P<0.0001). Observed postoperative mortality was higher than expected at low-volume centers [O:E ratio 1.39, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.05–1.83]. At low volume centers, high-risk patients (1.34, 0.85–2.12)--especially patients 1 year old or younger (1.60, 1.07–2.40) or those with congenital heart disease (1.36, 0.94–1.96)--did poorly, but those at high-volume centers did well (congenital heart disease: 0.90, 0.36–1.26; age<1 year: 0.75, 0.51–1.09). Similar results were obtained in the subset of patients transplanted after 1996. In multivariate logistic regression modeling, transplantation at a low-volume center was associated with an odds ratio for postoperative mortality of 1.60 (95% CI, 1.14–2.24); transplantation at a medium volume center had an odds ratio of 1.24 (95% CI, 0.92–1.66). CONCLUSION: The volume of transplants performed at any one center has a significant impact on outcomes. Regionalization of care is one option for improving outcomes in pediatric cardiac transplantation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".