Chance to cut: defining a negative exploration rate in patients with suspected necrotizing soft tissue infection

Necrotizing soft tissue infections (NSTI) are aggressive infections associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Despite multiple predictive models for the identification of NSTI, a subset of patients will not have an NSTI at the time of surgical exploration. We hypothesized there is a subset of patients without NSTI who are clinically indistinguishable from those with NSTI. We aimed to characterize the differences between NSTI and non-NSTI patients and describe a negative exploration rate for this disease process