Machine learning models to predict systemic inflammatory response syndrome after percutaneous nephrolithotomy

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate the performance of machine learning models for predicting the possibility of systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) following percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL). Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the clinical data of 337 patients who received PCNL between May 2020 and June 2022. In our study, 80% of the data were used as the training set, and the remaining data were used as the testing set. Separate prediction models based on the six machine learning algorithms were created using the training set. The predictive performance of each machine learning model was determined by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity and specificity using the testing set. We used coefficients to interpret the contribution of each variable to the predictive performance. Results: Among the six machine learning algorithms, the support vector machine (SVM) delivered the best performance with accuracy of 0.868, AUC of 0.942 (95% CI 0.890–0.994) in the testing set. Further analysis using the SVM model showed that prealbumin contributed the most to the prediction of the outcome, followed by preoperative urine culture, systemic immune-inflammation (SII), neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR), staghorn stones, fibrinogen, operation time, preoperative urine white blood cell (WBC), preoperative urea nitrogen, hydronephrosis, stone burden, sex and preoperative lymphocyte count. Conclusion: Machine learning-based prediction models can accurately predict the possibility of SIRS after PCNL in advance by learning patient clinical data, and should be used to guide surgeons in clinical decision-making.