An explainable long short-term memory network for surgical site infection identification (13 April 2024)

Summary

Currently, surgical site infection surveillance relies on labour-intensive manual chart review. Recently suggested solutions involve machine learning to identify surgical site infections directly from the medical record. Deep learning is a form of machine learning that has historically performed better than traditional methods, while being harder to interpret. This study proposed a deep learning model—an explainable long short-term memory network—for the identification of surgical site infection from the medical record.

The study found that the model had greater sensitivity when compared to traditional machine learning methods.