Loading...
Multiple scoring systems have been developed to identify patients with upper gastrointestinal bleeding (UGIB) who are at high risk for rebleeding and death. Most of these systems use evidence of comorbidities and large-volume bleeding with or without endoscopic information regarding high-risk stigmata.
Now, investigators in Italy have developed a computerized predictor of mortality using data from 2380 patients with nonvariceal UGIB collected from a network of 23 hospitals in a study consortium. The researchers used an artificial neural-network system called TWIST — an adaptive, computer program that analyzed pre-endoscopy data in nonlinear fashion to identify variables that correlated with 30-day mortality.
The result was a model based on 17…