Neurological prognosis prediction for cardiac arrest patients using quantitative imaging biomarkers from brain computed tomography.

• We predict the neurological prognosis of cardiac arrest patients using brain CT biomarkers. • We extracted 1131 biomarkers from two volumes of interest on brain CT images. • Various combinations of feature selections and ML algorithms were investigated. • The gray level with the maximum histogram gradient provided a high classification performance. • Our predictor may promote routine CT imaging for decision support in acute care. We aimed to predict the neurological prognosis of cardiac arrest (CA) patients using quantitative imaging biomarkers extracted from brain computed tomography images. We retrospectively enrolled 86 CA patients (good prognosis, 32; poor prognosis, 54) who were treated at three hospitals between 2017 and 2019. We then extracted 1131 quantitative imaging biomarkers from whole-brain and local volumes of interest in the computed tomography images of the patients. The data were split into training and test sets containing 60 and 26 samples, respectively, and the training set was used to select representative quantitative imaging biomarkers for classification. In univariate analysis, the classification was evaluated using the p -value of the Brunner–Munzel test and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for the test set. In multivariate analysis, machine learning models reflecting nonlinear and complex relations were trained, and they were evaluated using the AUC on the test set. The best performance provided p = 0.009 (<0.01) and an AUC of 0.775 (95% confidence interval, 0.590–0.960) for the univariate analysis and an AUC of 0.813 (95% confidence interval, 0.640–0.985) for the multivariate analysis. Overall, the gray level with the maximum gradient in the histogram of the three-dimensionally low-pass-filtered image was an important feature for prediction across the analyses. Quantitative imaging biomarkers can be used in neurological prognosis prediction for CA patients. Relevant biomarkers may contribute to protocolized computed tomography image acquisition to ensure proper decision support in acute care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]