ArticleBMC medical informatics and decision making2026
Machine learning prediction of long-term postoperative pneumonia risk: a retrospective cohort study.
Article in BMC medical informatics and decision making, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
backgroundPostoperative pneumonia is a significant complication, highlighting a patient's ongoing vulnerability. While traditional tools focus on short-term outcomes, the perioperative period offers a unique "stress test" window to identify high-risk patients. This study developed and validated a machine-learning-based prognostic framework to predict pneumonia risk up to one year after surgery.
methodsThis retrospective study examined 11,655 surgical encounters at a tertiary hospital. Multiple machine learning algorithms, including random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting, support vector machine, multilayer perceptron, and penalized logistic regression, were compared using 5-fold cross-validation. Class imbalance was handled using random oversampling (ROS) and undersampling. Models were tested on a separate set, and Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) analysis identified key predictors to improve clinical understanding.
resultsPostoperative pneumonia occurred in 238 encounters (2.04%) within 365 days, peaking in the second postoperative month. The RF model with ROS (1:4 ratio) achieved the highest performance with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.886, sensitivity of 85.4%, specificity of 77.4%, positive predictive value of 7.4%, and negative predictive value of 99.6%. SHAP analysis identified preoperative hemoglobin, European Society of Cardiology surgical risk, age, American Society of Anesthesiologists Physical Status class, and estimated glomerular filtration rate as key predictors of long-term vulnerability.
conclusionsMachine learning facilitates prognostic stratification of patients at high risk of long-term vulnerability. By functioning as a high-sensitivity secondary screening tool, this model allows clinicians to safely "rule out" low-risk individuals and concentrate intensive surveillance and resources on the high-risk cohort, thereby improving long-term outcomes.
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