Published online Oct 16, 2021. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v9.i29.8729
Peer-review started: June 6, 2021
First decision: June 25, 2021
Revised: July 7, 2021
Accepted: July 22, 2021
Article in press: July 22, 2021
Published online: October 16, 2021
Processing time: 130 Days and 21.9 Hours
Hypotension after the induction of anesthesia is known to be associated with various adverse events. The involvement of a series of factors makes the prediction of hypotension during anesthesia quite challenging.
To explore the ability and effectiveness of a random forest (RF) model in the prediction of post-induction hypotension (PIH) in patients undergoing cardiac surgery.
Patient information was obtained from the electronic health records of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University. The study included patients, ≥ 18 years of age, who underwent cardiac surgery from December 2007 to January 2018. An RF algorithm, which is a supervised machine learning technique, was employed to predict PIH. Model performance was assessed by the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic. Mean decrease in the Gini index was used to rank various features based on their importance.
Of the 3030 patients included in the study, 1578 (52.1%) experienced hypotension after the induction of anesthesia. The RF model performed effectively, with an AUC of 0.843 (0.808-0.877) and identified mean blood pressure as the most important predictor of PIH after anesthesia. Age and body mass index also had a significant impact.
The generated RF model had high discrimination ability for the identification of individuals at high risk for a hypotensive event during cardiac surgery. The study results highlighted that machine learning tools confer unique advantages for the prediction of adverse post-anesthesia events.
Core Tip: This was a retrospective study intended to develop a prediction model for hypotensive events after anesthesia during cardiac surgery. A random forest machine learning technique was used to establish a predictive algorithm using preoperative data. “Features ranked by importance” were also identified in this study. This novel prediction model can be used to predict hypotension events and help to avoid the occurrence of any potential adverse events.