Developing a scoring tool to estimate the risk of deterioration for normotensive patients with acute pulmonary embolism on admission

Background: It is important to identify deterioration in normotension patients with acute pulmonary embolism (PE). This study aimed to develop a tool for predicting deterioration among normotensive patients with acute PE on admission.Methods: Clinical, laboratory, and computed tomography parameters were retrospective collected for normotension patients with acute PE who were treated at a Chinese center from January 2011 to May 2020 on admission into hospital. The endpoint of the deterioration was any adverse outcome within 30 days. The eligible patients were randomized 2:1 to training and validation datasets. A nomogram was developed and validated by training and validation datasets respectively. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated. A risk-scoring tool for predicting deterioration was applied as a web-based calculator.Results: The 845 eligible patients (420 men, 425 women) had an average age of 60.05±15.43 years. Adverse outcomes were identified for 81 patients (9.6%). The nomogram for adverse outcomes included heart rate, systolic pressure, N-terminal-pro brain natriuretic peptide, and ventricular/atrial diameter ratios at 4-chamber view, which provided AUC values of 0.925 in the training dataset (95% CI: 0.900–0.946, p<0.001) and 0.900 in the validation dataset (95% CI: 0.883–0.948, p<0.001). A risk-scoring tool was published as a web-based calculator (https://gaoyzcmu.shinyapps.io/APE9AD/).Conclusions: We developed a web-based scoring tool that may help predict deterioration in normotensive patients with acute PE.