Personalized risk stratification through attribute matching for clinical decision making in clinical conditions with aspecific symptoms: The example of syncope

Risk stratification is challenging in conditions, such as chest pain, shortness of breath and syncope, which can be the manifestation of many possible underlying diseases. In these cases, decision tools are unlikely to accurately identify all the different adverse events related to the possible etiologies. Attribute matching is a prediction method that matches an individual patient to a group of previously observed patients with identical characteristics and known outcome. We used syncope as a paradigm of clinical conditions presenting with aspecific symptoms to test the attribute matching method for the prediction of the personalized risk of adverse events.