A Decision Tree Model to Help Treatment Decision-Making for Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms: A Multi-center, Long-Term Follow-up Study in a Large Chinese Cohort.

Abstract

Chinese population have a high prevalence of unruptured intracranial aneurysm (UIA). Clinical and imaging risk factors predicting UIA growth or rupture are poorly understood in the Chinese population due to the lack of large-scale longitudinal studies, and the treatment decision for UIA patients was challenging. Develop a decision tree (DT) model for UIA instability, and validate its performance in multi-center studies. Single-UIA patients from two prospective, longitudinal multicenter cohort studies were analyzed, and set as the development cohort and validation cohort. The primary endpoint was UIA instability (rupture, growth, or morphological change). A DT was established within the development cohort and validated within the validation cohort. The performance of clinicians in identifying unstable UIAs before and after the help of the DT was compared using the area under curve (AUC). The development cohort included 1270 patients with 1270 UIAs and a follow-up duration of 47.2 ± 15.5 months. Aneurysm instability occurred in 187 (14.7%) patients. Multivariate Cox analysis revealed hypertension (hazard ratio [HR], 1.54; 95%CI, 1.14-2.09), aspect ratio (HR, 1.22; 95%CI, 1.17-1.28), size ratio (HR, 1.31; 95%CI, 1.23-1.41), bifurcation configuration (HR, 2.05; 95%CI, 1.52-2.78) and irregular shape (HR, 4.30; 95%CI, 3.19-5.80) as factors of instability. In the validation cohort (n = 106, 12 was unstable), the DT model incorporating these factors was highly predictive of UIA instability (AUC, 0.88 [95%CI, 0.79-0.97]), and superior to existing UIA risk scales such as PHASES and ELAPSS (AUC, 0.77 [95%CI, 0.67-0.86] and 0.76 [95%CI, 0.66-0.86], P < 0.001). Within all 1376 single-UIA patients, the use of the DT significantly improved the accuracy of junior neurosurgical clinicians to identify unstable UIAs (AUC from 0.63 to 0.82, P < 0.001). The DT incorporating hypertension, aspect ratio, size ratio, bifurcation configuration and irregular shape was able to predict UIA instability better than existing clinical scales in Chinese cohorts. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: IARP-CP cohort were included (unique identifier: ChiCTR1900024547. Published July 15, 2019. Completed December 30, 2020), with 100-Project phase-I cohort (unique identifier: NCT04872842, Published May 5, 2021. Completed November 8, 2022) as the development cohort. The 100-Project phase-II cohort (unique identifier: NCT05608122. Published November 8, 2022) as the validation cohort.