patient subset

Two articles address the use of EuroSCORE II [1] in this issue of the journal. Kirmani et al. [2] compare the performance of the model against the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) [3–5] models for predicting mortality in a single-institution cohort of some 15 000 cardiac surgery patients operated on between 2001 and 2010. They find that both models work very well, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.818 (EuroSCORE) and 0.805 (STS). As EuroSCORE II is a relative-ly simple and easy-to-use model, they conclude that the choice between two equally discriminating models ‘falls in favour of the easier to use’. Howell et al. [6] compares EuroSCORE II against the older logistic [7] and additive [8] models in a bi-institutional cohort of 933 very high-risk patients (with a logistic EuroSCORE of>10). They find good calibration for EuroSCORE II (predicted mortality 9.3 and actual 9.7%) in this subset, but discriminatio