Surgical procedure prediction using medical ontological information

Predicting the duration of surgical procedures is an important step in scheduling operating rooms. Many factors have been shown to influence the duration of a procedure, in this research we aim to use medical ontological information to improve the predictions.

This paper presents two methods for incorporating the medical information about a surgical procedure into the prediction of the duration of the procedure. The first method uses the Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms to relate different procedures to each other. The second uses simple text fragments. The relationships between types of procedures are included in a regression model for the procedure duration. These methods are applied to data from New Zealand healthcare facilities and the accuracy of the estimations of the durations is compared. In addition a simulation of scheduling the procedures in an operating room is performed.

It is shown that both of the methods provide an improvement in the prediction of procedure durations. When compared to a traditional categorical encoding, the ontological information provides an improvement in the continuous ranked probability scores of the prediction of procedure durations from 18.4 min to 17.1 min, and from 25.3 to 21.3 min for types of procedures that are not performed very often.

Different methods for encoding medical ontological information in surgery procedure duration predictions are presented, and show an improvement over traditional models. The improvement in duration prediction is shown to improve the efficiency of scheduling in a simple simulation.