New AI helps prevent life-threatening drops in oxygen during surgery

A new machine-learning system has been developed which can help surgeons predict a dangerous blood condition during surgery.

The system, called Prescience, used information from patient vital signs and charts to improve their ability to detect hypoxemia by 16 per cent before surgery and 12 per cent during surgery.

The condition occurs without much warning and can result in low oxygen levels in the body’s tissues, leading to organ damage and sometimes death.

This new technology, as well as providing the prediction risk, also offers explanations behind its predictions, such as detecting whether the patient is at an increased risk due to blood oxygen levels of body mass index.

The research team, based at the University of Washington in Seattle, looked at data from 50,000 operations. Information obtained included patient age and weight, as well as information about the heart rate and blood oxygen levels.

During the research, cases were chosen that would be difficult to predict, such as where a patient’s blood oxygen level was stable for 10 minutes before dropping suddenly.

Scott Lundberg, one of the study’s authors, said “We wanted to know if this was going to be informative to anaesthesiologists. So for some of their cases they got a bar of additional information from Prescience.”

On the whole, the anaesthesiologists were able to differentiate between the hypoxemia risk prior to and during surgery nearly 80 per cent of the time.

Dr Monica Vavilala, Professor of Anaesthesiology at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, said “This research will allow us to better anticipate complications and target our treatment to each patient.

“If we know there’s one aspect that’s causing the problem, then we can approach that first and more quickly. This could really change the way we practice, so this is a really big deal.”

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Posted by Tony May, Partner/head of Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (tonymay@chadlaw.co.uk ), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.

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