Pediatric neurosurgery prediction tools
Lifetime outlook for children born with open spina bifida: predicted frailty and the chance of survival at ages 5, 25, 35 and 40, from findings at birth.
Key terms
- Open spina bifida (myelomeningocele)
Open spina bifida, most often myelomeningocele, is a neural tube defect in which the spinal cord is exposed at birth. Most affected children need lifelong care, often including a CSF shunt.
- Frailty index (deficit accumulation)
A frailty index counts health deficits a person has out of those assessed, giving a score from 0 to 1. Higher scores predict worse outcomes; values near 0.7 approach a practical ceiling.
- Survival analysis (time-to-event modeling)
Survival analysis models how long until an event happens, while correctly handling patients whose follow-up ends before the event (censoring).
- Concordance index (C-index)
The C-index measures how well a model ranks patients by risk: the chance that, of two patients, the one predicted at higher risk has the event first. 0.5 is chance, 1.0 is perfect.
- SHAP (Shapley additive explanations)
SHAP explains an individual prediction by splitting it into contributions from each input feature, based on Shapley values from game theory.
Research and educational tools. Not for clinical decision-making.