Psychosis Prognosis Predictor: A continuous and uncertainty‐aware prediction of treatment outcome in first‐episode psychosis

IntroductionMachine learning models have shown promising potential in individual‐level outcome prediction for patients with psychosis, but also have several limitations. To address some of these limitations, we present a model that predicts multiple outcomes, based on longitudinal patient data, while integrating prediction uncertainty to facilitate more reliable clinical decision‐making.Material and MethodsWe devised a recurrent neural network architecture incorporating long short‐term memory (LSTM) units to facilitate outcome prediction by leveraging multimodal baseline variables and clinical data collected at multiple time points. To account for model uncertainty, we employed a novel fuzzy logic approach to integrate the level of uncertainty into individual predictions. We predicted antipsychotic treatment outcomes in 446 first‐episode psychosis patients in the OPTiMiSE study, for six different clinical scenarios. The treatment outcome measures assessed at both week 4 and week 10 encompassed symptomatic remission, clinical global remission, and functional remission.ResultsUsing only baseline predictors to predict different outcomes at week 4, leave‐one‐site‐out validation AUC ranged from 0.62 to 0.66; performance improved when clinical data from week 1 was added (AUC = 0.66–0.71). For outcome at week 10, using only baseline variables, the models achieved AUC = 0.56–0.64; using data from more time points (weeks 1, 4, and 6) improved the performance to AUC = 0.72–0.74. After incorporating prediction uncertainties and stratifying the model decisions based on model confidence, we could achieve accuracies above 0.8 for ~50% of patients in five out of the six clinical scenarios.ConclusionWe constructed prediction models utilizing a recurrent neural network architecture tailored to clinical scenarios derived from a time series dataset. One crucial aspect we incorporated was the consideration of uncertainty in individual predictions, which enhances the reliability of decision‐making based on the model's output. We provided evidence showcasing the significance of leveraging time series data for achieving more accurate treatment outcome prediction in the field of psychiatry.