Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Opioid misuse persists as a public health crisis affecting approximately one in four Americans.1 Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is a neuromodulation strategy to treat chronic pain, with one goal being decreased opioid consumption. Accurate prognostication about SCS success is key in optimizing surgical decision making for both physicians and patients. Deep learning, using neural network models such as the multilayer perceptron (MLP), enables accurate prediction of non-linear patterns and has widespread applications in healthcare.
METHODS
The IBM MarketScan® (IBM) database was queried for all patients ≥ 18 years old undergoing SCS from January 2010 to December 2015. Patients were categorized into opioid dose groups as follows: No Use, ≤ 20 morphine milligram equivalents (MME), 20–50 MME, 50–90 MME, and >90 MME. We defined “opiate weaning” as moving into a lower opioid dose group (or remaining in the No Use group) during the 12 months following permanent SCS implantation. After pre-processing, there were 62 predictors spanning demographics, comorbidities, and pain medication history. We compared an MLP with four hidden layers to the LR model with L1 regularization. Model performance was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) with 5-fold nested cross-validation.
RESULTS
Ultimately, 6,124 patients were included, of which 77% had used opioids for >90 days within the 1-year pre-SCS and 72% had used >5 types of medications during the 90 days prior to SCS. The mean age was 56 ± 13 years old. Collectively, 2,037 (33%) patients experienced opiate weaning. The AUC was 0.74 for the MLP and 0.73 for the LR model.
CONCLUSION
To our knowledge, we present the first use of deep learning to predict opioid weaning after SCS. Model performance was slightly better than regularized LR. Future efforts should focus on optimization of neural network architecture and hyperparameters to further improve model performance. Models should also be calibrated and externally validated on an independent dataset. Ultimately, such tools may assist both physicians and patients in predicting opioid dose reduction after SCS.
Capsule Commentary on Sullivan et al., Primary Care Opioid Taper Plans Are Associated with Sustained Opioid Dose Reduction
