Abstract
The most commonly used preoperative assessment tools include the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program and the Revised Cardiac Risk Index. These tools seek to predict the risk of an individual experiencing postoperative complications, including but not limited to mortality, myocardial infarction, pneumonia, stroke, venous thromboembolism, and pneumonia. Many published studies have sought to objectively quantify the utility of the preoperative risk calculations by retrospectively compiling data for patients who underwent the same or comparable surgeries to compare actual complications to predicted complications. Therefore, we searched these studies to review the literature to draw more general conclusions and recommend which risk calculator is best for different types of surgeries.