Predicting risk of complications following a drug eluting stent procedure: A SVM approach for imbalanced data

Drug Eluting Stents (DES) have distinct advantages over other Percutaneous Coronary Intervention procedures, but have recently been associated with the development of serious complications after the procedure. There is a growing need for understanding the risk of these complications, which has led to the development of simple statistical models. In this work, we have developed a predictive model based on Support Vector Machines on a real world live dataset consisting of clinical variables of patients being treated at a cardiac care facility to predict the risk of complications at 12 months following a DES procedure. A significant challenge in this work, common to most clinical machine learning datasets, was imbalanced data, and our results showed the effectiveness of the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to address this issue. The developed predictive model provided an accuracy of 94% with a 0.97 AUC (Area under ROC curve), indicating high potential to be used as a decision support for management of patients following a DES procedure in real-world cardiac care facilities.