Difficult intubation assessment using statistical factor analysis decision tree

作者：Wanga Hsien Chang; Chen Wei Hao; Tseng Chia Chi; Chiu Yu Hsien^*

来源：Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers, 2014, 37(6): 710-721.

DOI：10.1080/02533839.2013.815015

• difficult intubation
• factor analysis
• decision tree
• decision making

Correct and rapid tracheal intubation is an essential anesthesia task for surgical operations. Intubation highly depends on the subjective judgment and experience of the anesthetist. This paper proposes a statistical factor analysis approach to model the preferences of expert anesthetists to enable more accurate pre-operation judgments in cases of difficult intubation. Factor analysis combined with the mutual information between factors is used to generate a robust decision tree (DT) using Bartlett%26apos;s node splitting criterion for better decision-making. A tablet computer application is also developed to assist judgment. Several experiments were performed to investigate judgment accuracy and learning effects. Our proposed approach outperformed both a well-known C5.0 DT and an expert opinion derived DT. Encouraging results concerning robustness and efficiency were observed for our approach.

• 出版日期2014