Yuh-Jyh H, Jia-Ying S and Tien-Hsiung K
In addition to pain, nausea and vomiting persist as the most frequent complaints of patients receiving patientcontrolled analgesia (PCA) after surgery. Many patients find postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) even more distressing than postoperative pain. Though many studies have evaluated the correlation of patient characteristics with PONV and identified several risk factors, there is little research into constructing models for PONV prediction. In this study, we proposed to analyze patient behaviors and apply machine learning methods to PONV prediction. We evaluated different learning algorithms, and investigated several data preprocessing techniques. We performed a thorough comparative study of machine learning techniques, and the experimental results suggest the application of machine learning to PONV prediction is feasible and promising.