Guideline-Aligned Machine Learning for Predicting Ondansetron Administration at the End of Anaesthesia: Explainable Decision Support for PONV Prophylaxis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) both aim to support clinical decision-making but may provide conflicting suggestions. This manuscript presents a Guideline-Aligned Machine Learning (GAML) model to predict ondansetron administration at the end of anaesthesia, based on Gan et al.'s Fourth Consensus Guidelines for the Management of Postoperative Nausea and Vomiting (PONV). n= 16,240 anaesthesia protocols were analysed for risk factors and administered PONV prophylaxes. Logistic regression, multinomial naïve Bayes, and CatBoost classifiers were trained on 80% of protocols with 12-fold cross-validation; optimal thresholds were set by the mean F1-maximising cut-off across folds. Models were evaluated on the remaining 20%, achieving high accuracy (90 ± 1%) and moderate precision and recall (60 ± 5%, 75 ± 4%) across all models. A SHAP decision plot was further computed on the test set to visualise predictor contributions and illustrate a potential interactive preoperative planning interface. Overall, GAML is a promising basis for explainable decision support in clinical care.