Abstract Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a well-recognized complication that is prevalent in patients undergoing major orthopedic surgery (e.g., total hip arthroplasty and total knee arthroplasty). For years, to identify patients at high risk of developing VTE, physicians have relied on traditional risk scoring systems, which are too simplistic to capture the risk level accurately. In this paper, we propose a data-driven machine learning framework to identify such high-risk patients before they undergo a major hip or knee surgery. Using electronic health records of more than 392,000 patients who undergone a major orthopedic surgery, and following a guided feature selection using the genetic algorithm, we trained a fully connected deep neural network model to predict high-risk patients for developing VTE. We identified several risk factors for VTE that were not previously recognized. The best FCDNN model trained using the selected features yielded an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.873, which was remarkably higher than the best AUC obtained by including only risk factors previously known in the medical literature. Our findings suggest several interesting and important insights. The traditional risk scoring tables that are being widely used by physicians to identify high-risk patients are not considering a comprehensive set of risk factors, nor are they as powerful as cutting-edge machine learning methods in distinguishing low- from high-risk patients.
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