Unsupervised Machine Learning to Identify Risk Factors of Pyeloplasty Failure in Ureteropelvic Junction Obstruction

In adult patients with ureteropelvic junction obstruction (UPJO), little data exist on predicting pyeloplasty outcome, and there is no unified definition of pyeloplasty success. As such, defining pyeloplasty success retrospectively is particularly vulnerable to bias, allowing researchers to choose significant outcomes with the benefit of hindsight. To mitigate these biases, we performed an unsupervised machine learning cluster analysis on a dataset of 216 pyeloplasty patients between 2015 and 2023 from a multihospital system to identify the defining risk factors of patients that experience worse outcomes.