ABSTRACT

With advances in anesthesia techniques, surgery has become increasingly applicable to a wider range of diseases and patients. Worldwide more than 230 million major surgical procedures are carried out each year. In terms of patient safety and medical economics, an important issue is how to reduce the incidence of postoperative complications and mortality. At least half of postoperative complications can be prevented, while improvements in anesthesia-associated factors contribute greatly to the prevention of complications. Anesthesia information management system is a specialized type of electronic health record that allow the automatic and reliable collection and storage of patient data during the perioperative period. The electronic anesthesia data not only provide a rich data set to assist both anesthesia providers and hospitals with their goals to improve patient safety during the fast-paced intra-operative period, but also capture detailed data to allow end users to access information for management, quality assurance, and research purposes. This project addresses the computational challenges in large-scale electronic anesthesia data mining, develops and validates an automated anesthesia risk prediction and decision support system to identify risk factors and detect patients at risk of postoperative complications and in-hospital mortality.

This project develops novel large-scale machine learning framework to integrate the emerging key computational techniques, such as semi-supervised generative adversarial learning, interpretable deep learning, large-scale optimization, and unsupervised hashing, to analyze large-scale electronic anesthesia data for enhancing anesthesia risk stratification and improving the quality of care for precision health. Specifically, the PIs investigate: 1) new computational tools to automate electronic anesthesia data processing, 2) novel semi-supervised generative adversarial network for anesthesia risk stratification, 3) interpretable deep learning model for clinical markers discovery, 4) scale up deep learning models for big data computation via new large-scale optimization algorithms, 5) new unsupervised deep generative adversarial hashing network for fast and accurate clinical case retrieval, and 6) evaluate the proposed methods and system using real large-scale anesthesia data. It is innovative to integrate large-scale machine learning and data-intensive computing for electronic anesthesia data mining that holds great promise for predicting postoperative outcomes using the comprehensive preoperative and intra-operative patient profiles. The developed methods and tools impact other public health research and enable investigators working on electronic health data to effectively test risk prediction hypothesis. This project facilitates the development of novel educational tools to enhance several current courses at University of Pittsburgh.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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