RESUMO
BACKGROUND: New patient referrals are often processed by practice coordinators with little-to-no medical background. Treatment delays due to incorrect referral processing, however, have detrimental consequences. Identifying variables that are associated with a higher likelihood of surgical oncological resection may improve patient referral processing and expedite the time to treatment. The study objective is to develop a supervised machine learning (ML) platform that identifies relevant variables associated with head and neck surgical resection. METHODS: A retrospective cohort study was conducted on 64 222 patient datapoints from the SEER database. RESULTS: The random forest ML model correctly classified patients who were offered head and neck surgery with an 81% accuracy rate. The sensitivity and specificity rates were 86% and 71%. The positive and negative predictive values were 85% and 73%. CONCLUSIONS: ML modeling accurately predicts head and neck cancer surgery recommendations based on patient and cancer information from a large population-based dataset. ML adjuncts for referral processing may decrease the time to treatment for patients with cancer.