Deep learning methods for clinical workflow phase-based prediction of procedure duration: a benchmark study

This study evaluates the performance of deep learning models in the prediction of the end time of procedures performed in the cardiac catheterization laboratory (cath lab). We employed only the clinical phases derived from video analysis as input to the algorithms. Our results show that InceptionTime and LSTM-FCN yielded the most accurate predictions. InceptionTime achieves Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values below 5 min and Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE) under 6% at 60-s sampling intervals. In contrast, LSTM with attention mechanism and standard LSTM models have higher error rates, indicating challenges in handling both long-term and short-term dependencies. CNN-based models, especially InceptionTime, excel at feature extraction across different scales, making them effective for time-series predictions. We also analyzed training and testing times. CNN models, despite higher computational costs, significantly reduce prediction errors. The Transformer model has the fastest inference time, making it ideal for real-time applications. An ensemble model derived by averaging the two best performing algorithms reported low MAE and SMAPE, although needing longer training. Future research should validate these findings across different procedural contexts and explore ways to optimize training times without losing accuracy. Integrating these models into clinical scheduling systems could improve efficiency in cath labs. Our research demonstrates that the models we implemented can form the basis of an automated tool, which predicts the optimal time to call the next patient with an average error of approximately 30 s. These findings show the effectiveness of deep learning models, especially CNN-based architectures, in accurately predicting procedure end times.