Blood products, age and ICU days¶

Red-cell and plasma units, age and ICU days are not heaped and get registry entries with a few flags rather than rounding models.

Data¶

• Red-cell units: 352 non-zero, mostly 1–5 units. Plasma units: 129 non-zero, 1–52.
• Age: 6,380 numbers, 8 coded ">89".
• ICU days: 0 in 81%, 1 in 13%, up to 179.

Method¶

• Checked counts for smoothness and last digits for heaping.
• Cross-checked red-cell units against blood loss for unit errors, and ICU days against the hospital stay.

Results¶

• Red-cell units track blood loss (Spearman 0.68). Five values look like mL entered as units: 400 and 800, plus 50, 60 and 68 units with blood loss of 50–350 mL.
• The red-cell rule (value ≥ 50 units and blood loss < 1,000 mL) flags exactly those 5 entries and leaves 59 and 69 units with 28–30 L blood loss alone.
• Large plasma values go with very large blood loss and are not flagged.
• Age: 19.2% end in 0 or 5 (20% expected). 10 infants have ages in tenths of a year (0.3–0.8).
• 6 cases have more ICU days than the hospital stay (order_violation).
• Since vitaldb-resolution v0.6.0 (18 October; model version 2): ICU days carry the flag icu_exceeds_postop where the count reaches the days from the case-day midnight to the discharge midnight (36 cases by the library's definition; Some ICU stays are longer than the postoperative stay), and the counting rule is recorded as assumed.

Discussion¶

• Blood products are exact counts. Probable mL entries are flagged, not converted, since the pack volume is unknown.
• ">89" is top-coded and returns an open interval from 90 (status top_coded).
• In-hospital death is binary and needs no model.

Observations it supports¶

Limitations¶

• Whether ages are completed years (floor) or rounded cannot be tested from the data. Floor is kept as a working assumption.
• ICU days cannot be checked against ICU admission and discharge times, which are not in the dataset. Until confirmed it is a count with ±1 day uncertainty.

Open questions¶

• How ICU days are counted (untestable assumption). The release does not say. The counts argue against calendar days touched (815 one-day stays against 98 two-day stays, where that rule would make 2 the commonest value), so the atlas reads them as nights in the ICU or completed days, which the data cannot tell apart. The VitalDB team could settle it.
• Age as completed years (untestable assumption). Age is taken as completed years (floor). The release documents only "years"; whole-number adults, infants in tenths of a year and the cap at 89 point to an exact age cut down, but the data cannot test it. Rounded age would shift every value by half a year.

Tags: from the resolution work