#2742 Artificial intelligence accurately approximates MGPE dose response relationship in a North American Dialysis Population
Authors: Garbelli Mario , Bellocchio Francesco , Larkin John , Jiao Yue , Wolf Melanie , Stuard Stefano , Barbieri Carlo , Mari Flavio , Hymes Jeffrey , Usvyat Len , Neri Luca 
Published: May 2024

Background and Aims

The Anemia Control Model (ACM) is a certified medical device aimed at optimizing the management of CKD-related anemia among patients on dialysis. ACM is based on an artificial neural network (ANN) trained on over 900’000 patients treated in the European Nephrocare Network. Over the years, ACM has offered physicians hundreds of thousands of erythropoietin stimulating agent (ESA) and intravenous iron dosing suggestions and ensured high hemoglobin target achievement rate while minimizing drug use. However, evidence concerning its validity in non-European samples is still limited. Apollo Dial DB is the largest, fully anonymized, collaborative, international database of dialysis patients. The database includes detailed clinical information of more than 500,000 patients over millions of patient-months of observation with an extensive representation over geographies as well as ethnic groups. Given its detailed medical information and size, the database may offer unprecedented opportunities to develop and test equitable and fair decision support systems based on artificial intelligence. In this study we sought to re-train and validate and assess the accuracy of the ACM in an ethnically diverse sample of North American dialysis patients in Apollo Dial DB.

Method

We constructed the cohort for training and validation of this new ACM version by including a random sample of patients treated in the North American Fresenius Medical Care Dialysis Network. The sample accounted for 20% of the entire North American Section of the Apollo Dial DB dataset. Each patient history has been segmented in a collection of patient-months, which was the unit of analysis. The initial cohort was split in 3 datasets for training (70%), validation (20%) and test (10%). The input variables included laboratory test results, body weight, treatment data, age, sex, and previous ESA and iron prescription. The outcome of interest was the variation in serum hemoglobin concentration over 1 month of follow up. We compared the accuracy of the original ACM based on ANN (baseline model) with a newly trained algorithm based on high-performance light GBM.

Results

We included 44,220 patients followed by 2,277,276 patient-months overall. The mean age=60.9 ± 13.4, 59.2% were male, 56.4% were Caucasians, 32.2% African American, 3.2% Asians and 8.2% were others. At baseline, mean Hb= 10.9 ± 1.2. The original EMEA version of the Anemia Control Model (ACM) was still accurate in North American patients (mean absolute error, MAE = 0.65 g/dL). The fine-tuned light GBM model achieved a 16% reduction in error rate (MAE = 0.55 g/dL; Fig. 1). No difference in MAE was observed across sex and ethnic groups.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates the excellent predictive performance of the original ANN-based ACM in the North American dialysis population. Fine tuning by re-training ACM on the dataset further improved the accuracy of the model with substantial equivalence in performance across different demographics, thus ensuring algorithmic fairness. ACM is a promising tool for anemia management in ethnically diverse dialysis population and different healthcare settings.