Identification of patients at risk of not achieving minimally clinically important differences (MCID) in patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) is important to ensure principled and informed pre-operative decision making. Machine learning techniques may enable the generation of a predictive model for attainment of MCID in hip arthroscopy. Aims: 1) to determine whether machine learning techniques could predict which patients will achieve MCID in the iHOT-12 PROM 6 months after arthroscopic management of femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), 2) to determine which factors contribute to their predictive power. Data from the UK Non-Arthroplasty Hip Registry database was utilised. We identified 1917 patients who had undergone hip arthroscopy for FAI with both baseline and 6 month follow up iHOT-12 and baseline EQ-5D scores. We trained three established machine learning algorithms on our dataset to predict an outcome of iHOT-12 MCID improvement at 6 months given baseline characteristics including demographic factors, disease characteristics and PROMs. Performance was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) statistics with 5-fold cross validation. The three machine learning algorithms showed quite different performance. The linear logistic regression model achieved AUROC = 0.59, the deep neural network achieved AUROC = 0.82, while a random forest model had the best predictive performance with AUROC 0.87. Of demographic factors, we found that BMI and age were key predictors for this model. We also found that removing all features except baseline responses to the iHOT-12 questionnaire had little effect on performance for the random forest model (AUROC = 0.85). Disease characteristics had little effect on model performance. Machine learning models are able to predict with good accuracy 6-month post-operative MCID attainment in patients undergoing arthroscopic management for FAI. Baseline scores from the iHOT-12 questionnaire are sufficient to predict with good accuracy whether a patient is likely to reach MCID in post-operative PROMs.
