MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH FOR PREOPERATIVE ANAESTHETIC RISK PREDICTION

Abstract

Risk is ubiquitous in medicine but anaesthesia is an unusual speciality as it routinely involves deliberately placing the patient in a situation that is intrinsically full of risk. Patient safety depends on management of those risks; consequently, anaesthetist has been at the forefront of clinical risk management. Anaesthetic risk classification is of prime importance not only in carrying out the day-to-day anaesthetic practice but coincides with surgical risks and morbidity condition. The preoperative assessment is made to identify the patients risk level based on American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) score that is widely used in anaesthetic practice. This helps the anaesthetist to make timely clinical decision. Machine Learning techniques can help the integration of computer-based systems in the healthcare environment providing opportunities to facilitate and enhance the work of medical experts and ultimately to improve the efficiency and quality of medical care. This paper presents the implementation of three supervised learning algorithms, C4.5 Decision tree classifier, Naive Bayes and Multilayer Perceptron in WEKA environment, on the preoperative assessment dataset. The classification models were trained using the data collected from 362 patients. The trained models were then used for predicting the anaesthetic risk of the patients. The prediction accuracy of the classifiers was evaluated using 10-fold cross validation and the results were compared.