Medical student Kyle Miletic will attend Cardiology 2015: The 18th annual Update on Pediatric and Congenital Cardiovascular Disease in Scottsdale, Ariz., Feb. 11-15 to share the latest developments that validate the usefulness of a post-heart surgery scoring system for children he presented at the same conference last year.
The Wayne State University School of Medicine senior is once again a finalist for the conference's Outstanding Investigator Award.
"There were approximately 300 abstracts that will be presented at what is one of the largest pediatric cardiology and cardiac surgery conferences in the country, and to be chosen as one of the top eight abstracts once again is a great honor," he said. "I think that by nominating two different phases of what is the same large project two years in a row speaks to the potential importance of this work in a pediatric cardiac surgery and intensive care."
He will present "Validation of Novel Scoring Method for Predicting Outcomes after Pediatric Cardiac Surgery" on Feb. 13.
In 2013 Miletic helped develop a scoring system that predicts how quickly infants younger than a year old recover after undergoing surgery for heart defects by looking at how well the heart, lungs and kidneys perform in the hours and days after the patient arrives in the intensive care unit from the operating room.
"We sought to validate the scoring system we developed prospectively. Since we had evidence that this worked in the retrospective study, we substantially broadened the patient population that we studied to include all children less than 18 years of age undergoing surgery in approximately a six-month period. We also were able to include all types of heart defects, including some of the most severe defects that we did not examine in last year's study," he said.
In the most recent trial, Miletic and colleagues found that the new scoring system, called the VVR, strongly predicted how well all children would do, including older children and those who were the most critically ill with extremely complex congenital heart issues.
"In fact, the results in the prospective study were even more robust than in our retrospective study," he said.
The previous study, "Use of a novel vasoactive-ventilation-renal score to predict outcomes after pediatric cardiac surgery," was published in the February 2015 issue of the Oxford Journal Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery.
Miletic took a leave of absence for the 2013-2014 school year to concentrate on the research. He is mentored by Christopher Mastropietro, M.D., a former School of Medicine faculty member who is now at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. He also is mentored by School of Medicine Professor of Surgery Henry Walters, M.D., and Ralph Delius, M.D., both cardiac surgeons at Children's Hospital of Michigan. "They all were essential in helping bring this research to fruition," he said.