Machine Learning in Anesthesia: Overcoming Variability in Drug Response and Patient Sensitivity

Abstract

Background: Patients exhibit different anesthesia responses because their genetic makeup and metabolic pathways and their medical conditions and their demographic background differ. Standard anesthesia dosing protocols fail to recognize patient differences so they deliver substandard drug effects and produce longer recovery periods and negative side effects. The advancement of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) enables data-driven predictive models to optimize customized anesthetic delivery thus producing better patient safety and operation results.

Objective: The research focuses on studying how individual patient characteristics affect anesthesia drug responses to create a predictive model that uses demographic and medical information for treatment outcome and adverse effect predictions.

Methods: The research analyzed 1,000 patient records containing information about demographics together with genetic predispositions and chronic conditions as well as drug allergies and symptoms and recommended medications and postoperative outcomes. The data preprocessing pipeline involved encoding categorical data and filling missing values and performing feature scaling along with detecting outliers. The application used supervised machine learning approaches to conduct both classification tasks for treatment effectiveness and regression tasks for recovery time prediction. The evaluation of the models included accuracy measures in addition to precision-recall metrics and RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) to validate clinical applicability.

Results: The research study established meaningful statistical relationships between Body Mass Index values, patient age, ongoing health issues and how patients reacted to anesthesia. Higher Body Mass Index and preexisting medical conditions caused patients to show more variable drug metabolism patterns which resulted in 36.8% of adverse drug reactions. The XGBoost classifier delivered superior performance with 88.4% accuracy but Support Vector Regression (SVR) demonstrated the best recovery time prediction through 3.76 RMSE results. The research shows that predictive modeling based on ML operates effectively for optimizing anesthesia delivery.

Conclusion: The research demonstrates why AI-assisted anesthesia management requires attention to reduce drug response variability. Machine learning integration in perioperative care helps clinicians deliver precise dosing while reducing treatment side effects which leads to better patient safety outcomes. Research moving forward should concentrate on real-time AI-based systems for anesthetic monitoring to enhance dynamic and patient-specific dosage variations.