Estimating the effect of Tranexamic Acid on Head Traumatized patients with Causal Matching

The aim of this paper is to study the causal effect of the use of tranexamic acid in head trauma patients, using a dataset provided by the AP-HP (Paris Hospital), gathering medical information on major trauma victims. In observational studies, one of the major difficulties is to cope with the lack of an adequate control group. This is because, unlike in randomized experiments, there is a bias in the administration of treatment.

In (1), we present the associated statistical framework. In (2), we describe three of the main techniques used for matching: coarse exact matching, cardinality matching and propensity matching. Since there is little statistical evidence for the effectiveness of these techniques, we designed and implemented experiments to provide empirical results. We generated several synthetic datasets with various underlying complexities and compared our methods on these datasets. In (3), we outline the methodology and results of this experiment. Thereafter, we applied our methods on the trauma database after preprocessing it. This allowed us to obtain an estimate of the treatment effect, which we present in (4). Finally, because the use of the trauma database involves imputation of missing data, we study the robustness to missing data of our three matching methods in (5).