Blood conservation in coronary artery bypass surgery: prediction with assistance of a computer model.

A computer assisted model was created with the data from 514 consecutive coronary bypass patients in order to predict the potential need of a blood transfusion. During this time period strict management protocols were used. In this series 261 (55.9%) patients were never and 46 (9.9%) were only intraoperatively transfused. Intra- and postoperative transfusions were necessary for 160 (34.2%) patients. Preoperative hematocrit, age, sex, and weight were the statistically significant parameters in the development of the model.