Techniques to aid prediction of pacing dependence at 30 days in patients requiring pacemaker implantation after cardiac surgery

Permanent pacemaker (PPM) implantation occurs in up to 5 % of patients after cardiac surgery but there is little consensus on how long to wait between surgery and PPM insertion. Predicting the likelihood of a patient being pacing dependent 30 days after implant can aid with this timing decision and avoid unnecessary observation time waiting for intrinsic conduction to recover. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for the prediction of PPM dependency at 30 days after implant in patients who have undergone recent cardiac surgery. The aim is to create an automatic detection model able to support clinicians in the decision-making process. We first applied Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and Bayesian Networks (BN) to the dataset, to balance the inherently imbalanced data and create additional synthetic data respectively. The six resultant datasets were then used to train four different classifiers to predict pacing dependence at 30 days, all using the same testing set. The Bagged Trees classifier achieved the best results, reaching an area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) of 90 % in the train phase, and 83 % in the test phase. The overall classification performance was clearly enhanced when using SMOTE and synthetic data created with BN to create a combined and balanced dataset. This technique could be of great use in answering clinical questions where the original dataset is imbalanced.