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Patients in intensive care units (ICUs) were at higher risk of worsen prognosis and mortality. Here, we aimed to evaluate the ability of the Simplified Acute Physiology Score (SAPS II) to predict the risk of 7-day mortality, and to test a machine learning algorithm which combines the SAPS II with additional patients' characteristics at ICU admission. We used data from the "Italian Nosocomial Infections Surveillance in Intensive Care Units" network. Support Vector Machines (SVM) algorithm was used to classify 3782 patients according to sex, patient's origin, type of ICU admission, non-surgical treatment for acute coronary disease, surgical intervention, SAPS II, presence of invasive devices, trauma, impaired immunity, antibiotic therapy and onset of HAI. The accuracy of SAPS II for predicting patients who died from those who did not was 69.3%, with an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.678. Using the SVM algorithm, instead, we achieved an accuracy of 83.5% and AUC of 0.896. Notably, SAPS II was the variable that weighted more on the model and its removal resulted in an AUC of 0.653 and an accuracy of 68.4%. Overall, these findings suggest the present SVM model as a useful tool to early predict patients at higher risk of death at ICU admission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]