Machine learning algorithms to predict intraoperative hemorrhage in surgical patients: a modeling study of real-world data in Shanghai, China

BACKGROUND: Prediction tools for various intraoperative bleeding events remain scarce. We aim to develop machine learning-based models and identify the most important predictors by real-world data from electronic medical records (EMRs). METHODS: An established database of surgical inpatients in Shanghai was utilized for analysis. A total of 51,173 inpatients were assessed for eligibility. 48,543 inpatients were obtained in the dataset and patients were divided into haemorrhage (N = 9728) and without-haemorrhage (N = 38,815) groups according to their bleeding during the procedure. Candidate predictors were selected from 27 variables, including sex (N = 48,543), age (N = 48,543), BMI (N = 48,543), renal disease (N = 26), heart disease (N = 1309), hypertension (N = 9579), diabetes (N = 4165), coagulopathy (N = 47), and other features. The models were constructed by 7 machine learning algorithms, i.e., light gradient boosting (LGB), extreme gradient boosting (XGB), cathepsin B (CatB), Ada-boosting of decision tree (AdaB), logistic regression (LR), long short-term memory (LSTM), and multilayer perception (MLP). An area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to evaluate the model performance. RESULTS: The mean age of the inpatients was 53 ± 17 years, and 57.5% were male. LGB showed the best predictive performance for intraoperative bleeding combining multiple indicators (AUC = 0.933, sensitivity = 0.87, specificity = 0.85, accuracy = 0.87) compared with XGB, CatB, AdaB, LR, MLP and LSTM. The three most important predictors identified by LGB were operative time, D-dimer (DD), and age. CONCLUSIONS: We proposed LGB as the best Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) algorithm for the evaluation of intraoperative bleeding. It is considered a simple and useful tool for predicting intraoperative bleeding in clinical settings. Operative time, DD, and age should receive attention. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12911-023-02253-w.