Machine learning to predict in-hospital mortality risk among heterogenous STEMI patients with diabetes
Authors: Kasim S , Malek S , Aziz M F , Ibrahim K S 
Published: February 2022

Funding Acknowledgements

Type of funding sources: Public grant(s) – National budget only. Main funding source(s): TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT FUND 1

Background

Diabetes has become a major public health concern in Asia. In Malaysia, the prevalence of diabetes has escalated in adults above the age of 18, affecting 3.9  million individuals. Patients with diabetes and coronary heart disease have worse outcomes, compared with patients without diabetes who have coronary heart disease. Conventional Risk scores such as TIMI and GRACE were derived from a Western Caucasian cohort with limited data from  Asian countries, despite Asia hosting 60% of the world’s population.

Purpose

It is important to recognize the significant features associated with in-hospital mortality risk that is population-specific in Asian diabetes patients with STEMI to achieve a reliable and effective clinical diagnosis and improved outcome. Electronic health records contain large amounts of information on patients’ medical history and are becoming invaluable research tools that could be applied to cardiovascular disease risk prediction through machine learning (ML) algorithms. With the current success of ML  over conventional methods in STEMI mortality prediction, we aim to develop ML algorithms for in-hospital risk mortality in Asian patients diagnosed with DM that can be adopted for clinical predictions

Methods

We used registry data from the Malaysian National Cardiovascular Disease Database of 5783 patients diagnosed with DM from 2006 to 2016. Fifty parameters including demographics, cardiovascular risk, medications and clinical variables were considered. Four machine learning (ML) algorithms were constructed using a 70% registry dataset; Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Booster (XGB) and Logistic Regression (LR). Feature selections were done based on ML algorithms feature importance combined with Sequential Backward Selection (SBS). The area under the curve (AUC)  was used as the performance evaluation metric. All algorithms were validated using a 30 % validation dataset and compared to the conventional TIMI risk score for STEMI.

Results

The best model SVM (AUC = 0.90) outperformed other ML algorithms (Figure 1) and TIMI risk score (AUC = 0.83). The best SVM model consists of 11 predictors which are Killip class, fasting blood glucose, age, systolic blood pressure, heart rate, ACE inhibitor, beta-blocker, total cholesterol, diastolic blood pressure, lower density lipoprotein, and diuretic (Figure 2). Common predictors of SVM and TIMI risk score are Killip class, age, systolic blood pressure, and heart rate. We have shown that the population-specific data mining approach for the prediction of diabetes patients’ mortality post-STEMI outperformed conventional TIMI risk score.

Conclusion

In the Asian multiethnic population, combination of ML approaches with features selection demonstrated promising outcomes in patients with DM that may be used for better patient prognostic than the conventional method. Abstract Figure 1: ML Best Model Performance  Abstract Figure 2: Selected Predictors for ML