Machine Learning-Based Prediction of Major Postoperative Complications After Noncardiac Surgery Under General Anesthesia Using Routinely Available Electronic Health Record Data: Retrospective Multicenter Development and Validation Study

Postoperative complications after noncardiac surgery under general anesthesia remain a major cause of morbidity, mortality, and resource-intensive care. Conventional risk assessment tools rely mainly on preoperative information and may not capture perioperative physiological and procedural factors associated with postoperative risk.

This retrospective multicenter observational study aimed to develop and validate electronic health record (EHR)-based machine learning (ML) models for predicting major postoperative complications and to evaluate their discrimination, overall probabilistic performance, calibration, and potential clinical utility.

We analyzed 35,702 adults who underwent noncardiac surgery under general anesthesia at 3 tertiary hospitals between January 2021 and March 2025. Preoperative, intraoperative, and early postoperative variables were extracted from diagnosis procedure combination (DPC) claims, EHRs, and anesthesia information systems. The primary outcome was a 30-day composite of in-hospital death, unplanned reoperation, prolonged mechanical ventilation, new initiation of renal replacement therapy, and postoperative infection. Logistic regression (LR), extreme gradient boosting (XGB), and light gradient boosting machine (LGBM) models were developed using preoperative variables alone or with 7 additional intraoperative and early postoperative variables. Leave-one-facility-out internal-external cross-validation (IECV) was the primary validation framework, with a stratified random 80:20 hold-out analysis as secondary validation. Performance was assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), area under the precision-recall curve (PR-AUC), Brier score, scaled Brier score, calibration measures, and decision curve analysis.

The primary composite outcome occurred in 3884 of 35,702 patients (10.9%). In pooled IECV, perioperative models consistently outperformed the corresponding preoperative models. AUROC increased from 0.784-0.791 to 0.810-0.817, PR-AUC increased from 0.356-0.361 to 0.405-0.413, Brier scores decreased from 0.082-0.083 to 0.078-0.080, and scaled Brier scores increased from 0.144-0.151 to 0.175-0.191. Calibration varied across facilities; pooled calibration slopes for the perioperative models ranged from 0.875 to 0.902, and calibration intercepts ranged from -0.367 to -0.222, indicating overly extreme predictions and overall risk overestimation. Exploratory decision curve analysis generally showed greater net benefit for perioperative models across threshold probabilities of 0.01-0.30, although the curves overlapped substantially. Secondary and sensitivity analyses were consistent with the primary findings.

Adding routinely available intraoperative and early postoperative variables produced modest but consistent improvements in postoperative risk prediction compared with preoperative variables alone. However, facility-specific variation in calibration limits direct transportability of absolute risk estimates. The models may support prioritization for postoperative clinical reassessment, but exploratory decision curve analysis did not establish a specific intervention or triage threshold. Local recalibration and prospective workflow evaluation are required before clinical implementation.