Application of Machine Learning for Predicting Anastomotic Leakage in Patients with Gastric Adenocarcinoma Who Received Total or Proximal Gastrectomy

Anastomotic leakage is a life-threatening complication in patients with gastric adenocarcinoma who received total or proximal gastrectomy, and there is still no model accurately predicting anastomotic leakage. In this study, we aim to develop a high-performance machine learning tool to predict anastomotic leakage in patients with gastric adenocarcinoma received total or proximal gastrectomy. A total of 1660 cases of gastric adenocarcinoma patients who received total or proximal gastrectomy in a large academic hospital from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2019 were investigated, and these patients were randomly divided into training and testing sets at a ratio of 8:2. Four machine learning models, such as logistic regression, random forest, support vector machine, and XGBoost, were employed, and 24 clinical preoperative and intraoperative variables were included to develop the predictive model. Regarding the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), and accuracy, random forest had a favorable performance with an AUC of 0.89, a sensitivity of 81.8% and specificity of 82.2% in the testing set. Moreover, we built a web app based on random forest model to achieve real-time predictions for guiding surgeons’ intraoperative decision making.