Machine Learning for the Prediction of Progression in Patients With Acute Kidney Injury in Critical Care

Background Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a serve and harmful syndrome in the intensive care unit. Our previous study has shown that patients who will progress to AKI 3 stage are considered to receive RRT. This study aimed to develop a prediction model that can predict whether progression to AKI stage 3. Methods Patients with AKI stage 1/2, when they were first diagnosed with AKI in the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III), were included. Patients who receive RRT or progress to AKI 3 stage within 72 hours of first AKI diagnosis were excluded. We build two predictive models, respectively using machine learning extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and logistic regression, to predict patients who will progress to AKI stage 3. Established models were evaluated by cross-validation and area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AU-ROC). Results Of the 29238 patients included in the analysis, 3237 (11.1%) patients progressed to AKI stage 3. Creatinine, blood urea nitrogen (BUN), sepsis and respiratory failure were the important predictors of AKI progression. The machine learning XGBoost model has a better performance than the Cox regression model on predicting AKI stage 3 progression (AU-ROC, 0.860 vs. 0.728, respectively). Conclusions The XGBoost model was able to identify patients with AKI progression better than the Cox regression model. Machine learning techniques may improve predictive modeling in medical research.