Statistical analysis
All analyses were conducted with SPSS Statistics, Version 27 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY) and R version 3.6.1 (The R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria). Continuous variables are reported as mean ± standard deviation or median (interquartile range [IQR]), depending on normality, and categorical variables are reported as frequency (percent). Group comparisons were conducted with independent samplest -tests or Mann-Whitney U tests for continuous variables and Chi-Squared or Fisher’s Exact tests for categorical variables, as appropriate. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used to compare related samples. Spearman correlations were used to compare two continuous variables. Double-robust linear regression analyses were conducted to compare cases and controls on the aortic measurement variables with adjustment for the factors in the propensity score model (age, sex, race, body surface area, and hypertension) to account for any residual confounding that may have been present. A subset of 10 patients (5 cases and 5 controls) were measured by all three personnel who conducted the image analysis to evaluate inter-rater reliability using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) based on a single-measurement, absolute-agreement, and 2-way mixed-effects model.
RESULTS