Abstract
Successful estimation of postoperative PROMs prior to a joint replacement surgery is important in deciding the best treatment option for a patient. However, estimation of the outcome is associated with substantial noise around individual prediction. Here, we test whether a classifier neural network can be used to simultaneously estimate postoperative PROMs and uncertainty better than current methods.
We perform Oxford hip score (OHS) estimation using data collected by the NJR from 249,634 hip replacement surgeries performed from 2009 to 2018. The root mean square error (RMSE) of the various methods are compared to the standard deviation of outcome change distribution to measure the proportion of the total outcome variability that the model can capture. The area under the curve (AUC) for the probability of the change score being above a certain threshold was also plotted.
The proposed classifier NN had a better or equivalent RMSE than all other currently used models. The standard deviation for the change score for the entire population was 9.93, which can be interpreted as the RMSE that would be achieved for a model that gives the same estimation for all patients regardless of the covariates. However, most of the variation in the postoperative OHS/OKS change score is not captured by the models, confirming the importance of accurate uncertainty estimation. The threshold AUC shows similar results for all methods close to a change score of 20 but demonstrates better accuracy of the classifier neural network close to 0 change and greater than 30 change, showing that the full probability distribution performed by the classifier neural network resulted in a significant improvement in estimating the upper and lower quantiles of the change score probability distribution. Consequently, probabilistic estimation as performed by the classifier NN is the most adequate approach to this problem, since the final score has an important component of uncertainty.
This study shows the importance of uncertainty estimation to accompany postoperative PROMs prediction and presents a clinically-meaningful method for personalised outcome that includes such uncertainty estimation.
