| Abstract: |
Spine surgery is expensive, invasive and associated with important risks. The potential benefits of intervention must be balanced against these harms and risks. Decision curve analysis is a statistical method for evaluating models, rules and tests to indicate patients for intervention. The net benefit of a proposed tool can be compared with the clinical default strategies of “treat all” vs. “treat none” across a range of clinically reasonable threshold probabilities, thereby demonstrating whether the use of a prediction model or diagnostic test is clinically useful. Here we discuss the current applications of decision curve analysis within the spine population. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. |
