Anesthesia and analgesia
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Jan 2011
Comparative StudyAccurate classification of difficult intubation by computerized facial analysis.
Bedside airway evaluation is conduced before anesthesia, but all current methods perform modestly, with low sensitivity and positive predictive value. We hypothesized that subjective features of patients' anatomies improve anesthesiologists' ability to predict difficult intubation, and derived a computer model to do so, based on analysis of photographs of patients' faces. ⋯ Computerized analysis of facial structure and thyromental distance can classify easy versus difficult intubation with accuracy significantly outperforming popular clinical predictive tests.