Development and validation of a machine learning-based predictive model for secondary post-tonsillectomy hemorrhage

BACKGROUND: The main obstacle to a patient's recovery following a tonsillectomy is complications, and bleeding is the most frequent culprit. Predicting post-tonsillectomy hemorrhage (PTH) allows for accurate identification of high-risk populations and the implementation of protective measures. Our study aimed to investigate how well machine learning models predict the risk of PTH. METHODS: Data were obtained from 520 patients who underwent a tonsillectomy at The 940th Hospital of Joint Logistics Support Force of Chinese People's Liberation Army. The age range of the patients was 2–57 years, and 364 (70%) were male. The prediction models were developed using five machine learning models: decision tree, support vector machine (SVM), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), random forest, and logistic regression. The performance of the models was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) was used to interpret the results of the best-performing model. RESULTS: The frequency of PTH was 11.54% among the 520 patients, with 10.71% in the training group and 13.46% in the validation set. Age, BMI, season, smoking, blood type, INR, combined secretory otitis media, combined adenoidectomy, surgical wound, and use of glucocorticoids were selected by mutual information (MI) method. The XGBoost model had best AUC (0.812) and Brier score (0.152). Decision curve analysis (DCA) showed that the model had a high clinical utility. The SHAP method revealed the top 10 variables of MI according to the importance ranking, and the average of the age was recognized as the most important predictor variable. CONCLUSION: This study built a PTH risk prediction model using machine learning. The XGBoost model is a tool with potential to facilitate population management strategies for PTH.