Clinical prediction models: a fashion or a necessity in medicine?

Surgeons need tools to help them make decisions when discussing therapeutic management. According to PubMed, the number of publications of prognostic studies has increased exponentially in recent years (1). Risk models have been developed for many surgical interventions. One of the most famous is the EuroSCORE for cardiac surgery (2). The first risk model for thoracic surgery was the Thoracoscore, created by Falcoz et al. (3). This score was developed using data from the French national thoracic surgery database Epithor^®.