Machine-learning-based prediction of survival and mitral regurgitation recurrence in patients undergoing mitral valve repair

OBJECTIVES This study was conducted to assess long-term clinical outcomes after mitral valve repair using machine-learning techniques.METHODS We retrospectively evaluated 436 consecutive patients (mean age: 54.7 +/- 15.4; 235 males) who underwent mitral valve repair between January 2000 and December 2017. Actuarial survival and freedom from significant (>= moderate) mitral regurgitation (MR) were clinical end points. To evaluate the independent risk factors, random survival forest (RSF), extreme gradient boost (XGBoost), support vector machine, Cox proportional hazards model and general linear models with elastic net regularization were used. Concordance indices (C-indices) of each model were estimated.RESULTS The operative mortality was 0.9% (N = 4). Reoperation was required in 15 patients (3.5%). In terms of C-index, the overall performance of the XGBoost (C-index 0.806) and RSF models (C-index 0.814) was better than that of the Cox model (C-index 0.733) in overall survival. For the recurrent MR, the C-index for XGBoost was 0.718, which was the highest among the 5 models. Compared to the Cox model (C-index 0.545), the C-indices of the XGBoost (C-index 0.718) and RSF models (C-index 0.692) were higher.CONCLUSIONS Machine-learning techniques can be a useful tool for both prediction and interpretation in the survival and recurrent MR. From the machine-learning techniques examined here, the long-term clinical outcomes of mitral valve repair were excellent. The complexity of MV increased the risk of late mitral valve-related reoperation. Mitral valve repair is considered to have better survival and clinical outcomes compared to valve replacement [1-3].