Forecasting cumulative intraoperative hypotension burden: patient-disjoint evaluation of quantile boosting and alert policies

An Intraoperative Hypotension (IOH) event is a frequent complication during administration of general anaesthesia with serious downstream consequences, yet clinical management remains reactive and not predictive. Existing predictive models, however, ignore drug infusion history as a valuable signal for prediction despite its direct pharmacological relevance. Our model achieves an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.7360 and an Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) of 0.1794, representing a 2.73-fold lift over the random guessing AUPRC baseline (0.0657), with the removal of propofol and remifentanil effect-site concentrations resulting in a 13.9% AUPRC drop compared to the full model. This is consistent with the hypothesis that pharmacokinetic trajectories encode impending haemodynamic changes before they manifest in the Mean Arterial Pressure (MAP). Additionally, this paper shows that training without lead-gap filtering degraded AUROC by 16.7%, empirically confirming that unfiltered models learn to detect ongoing hypotension rather than predict future events. Finally, a Mamba-based architecture achieves the aforementioned high prediction performance while maintaining a constant memory footprint across a range of sequence lengths, unlike the quadratic VRAM overhead typical of vanilla Transformers, making it the more practical choice for continuous intraoperative deployment.

Clinical time-series forecasting is increasingly studied for decision support, yet standard aggregate metrics can obscure whether a model is actually useful for the task it is meant to serve. In safety-critical settings, low average error can coexist with dangerous failures in exactly the high-risk regimes that matter most. We present a task-aware evaluation framework for blood glucose forecasting built around two downstream uses: hypoglycemia early warning and insulin dosing decision support. For early warning, we evaluate on real data from three clinical cohorts using event-level recall and false alarms per patient-day, metrics that reflect operational alarm burden rather than aggregate accuracy. We show that models appearing acceptable overall, with recall above 0.9 on the full test set, can fail badly in the post-bolus slice, where insulin-on-board is elevated and missed warnings carry the greatest clinical consequences. Standard forecasting evaluation, however, does not test whether a model can reason about the effects of actions, a requirement for supporting insulin dosing decisions. We therefore add a second, interventional arm using the FDA-accepted UVA/Padova simulator, where we evaluate whether forecasters can predict glucose responses to altered insulin plans in paired factual/counterfactual scenarios. We show that models that look strong on real-data forecasting often fail to predict the direction, magnitude, or ranking of intervention effects, and choose poor insulin doses when evaluated under a clinically motivated cost. Taken together, the two arms reveal a consistent gap between forecasting accuracy and task-relevant usefulness. We release the benchmark, the standardized preprocessing pipeline for public cohorts, and the simulator-based interventional dataset as a reproducible toolkit.

The task of constructing a predictor that is simultaneously accurate under multiple evaluation metrics has been popularized recently under the name omniprediction. Prior work in this area has largely focused on binary prediction tasks, and existing results for multiclass and continuous outcomes typically suffer from slow error rates. In this paper, we consider forecasts expressed as a set of quantiles over a discrete but otherwise arbitrary set of probability levels. We develop sample-efficient algorithms for constructing forecasts that are accurate simultaneously across all proper losses that satisfy mild regularity conditions, where proper losses are those minimized by predicting the true quantiles. Our algorithms are online and can operate in a dynamic environment, while simultaneously taking multiple losses into account, and their forecasts offer the potential to provide diverse end-users with rich information for evaluating risk and informing a range of practical decision-making tasks. As an example, we demonstrate how our procedure can be used to ensemble quantile forecasts of COVID-19 hospitalizations made by experts during the pandemic.