Motivation. Patients who experienced postoperative delirium (POD) are at higher risk of poor outcomes like dementia or death. Previous machine learning (ML) models predicting POD mostly relied on time-aggregated features.
Objective. We assessed the potential of temporal patterns in clinical parameters during surgeries to predict POD.
Methods. Long short-term memory (LSTM) and transformer models, directly consuming time series, were compared to multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) trained on time-aggregated features. We also fitted hybrid models, fusing either LSTM or transformer models with MLPs. Univariate Spearman’s rank correlations and linear mixed-effect models establish the importance of individual features that we compared to transformers’ attention weights.
Results. Best performance was achieved by a transformer architecture ingesting 30 minutes of intraoperative parameter sequences. Systolic invasive blood pressure and given opioids marked the most important input variables, in line with univariate feature importances.
Conclusion. Intraoperative temporal dynamics of clinical parameters, exploited by a tailored transformer architecture named TRAPOD, are critical for the accurate prediction of POD.