Advanced cardiovascular risk prediction in the emergency department: updating a clinical prediction model – a large database study protocol

BACKGROUND: Patients presenting with chest pain represent a large proportion of attendances to emergency departments. In these patients clinicians often consider the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), the timely recognition and treatment of which is clinically important. Clinical prediction models (CPMs) have been used to enhance early diagnosis of AMI. The Troponin-only Manchester Acute Coronary Syndromes (T-MACS) decision aid is currently in clinical use across Greater Manchester. CPMs have been shown to deteriorate over time through calibration drift. We aim to assess potential calibration drift with T-MACS and compare methods for updating the model. METHODS: We will use routinely collected electronic data from patients who were treated using TMACS at two large NHS hospitals. This is estimated to include approximately 14,000 patient episodes spanning June 2016 to October 2020. The primary outcome of acute myocardial infarction will be sourced from NHS Digital’s admitted patient care dataset. We will assess the calibration drift of the existing model and the benefit of updating the CPM by model recalibration, model extension and dynamic updating. These models will be validated by bootstrapping and one step ahead prequential testing. We will evaluate predictive performance using calibrations plots and c-statistics. We will also examine the reclassification of predicted probability with the updated TMACS model. DISCUSSION: CPMs are widely used in modern medicine, but are vulnerable to deteriorating calibration over time. Ongoing refinement using routinely collected electronic data will inevitably be more efficient than deriving and validating new models. In this analysis we will seek to exemplify methods for updating CPMs to protect the initial investment of time and effort. If successful, the updating methods could be used to continually refine the algorithm used within TMACS, maintaining or even improving predictive performance over time. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN number: ISRCTN41008456