A proof-of-concept study on mortality prediction with machine learning algorithms using burn intensive care data.

Introduction: Burn injuries are a common traumatic injury. Large burns have high mortality requiring intensive care and accurate mortality predictions. To assess if machine learning (ML) could improve predictions, ML algorithms were tested and compared with the original and revised Baux score.

Methods: Admission data and mortality outcomes were collected from patients at Uppsala University Hospital Burn Centre from 2002 to 2019. Prognostic variables were selected, ML algorithms trained and predictions assessed by analysis of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Comparison was made with Baux scores using DeLong test.

Results: A total of 17 prognostic variables were selected from 92 patients. AUCs in leave-one-out cross-validation for a decision tree model, an extreme boosting model, a random forest model, a support-vector machine (SVM) model and a generalised linear regression model (GLM) were 0.83 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.72-0.94), 0.92 (95% CI = 0.84-1), 0.92 (95% CI = 0.84-1), 0.92 (95% CI = 0.84-1) and 0.84 (95% CI = 0.74-0.94), respectively. AUCs for the Baux score and revised Baux score were 0.85 (95% CI = 0.75-0.95) and 0.84 (95% CI = 0.74-0.94). No significant differences were observed when comparing ML algorithms with Baux score and revised Baux score. Secondary variable selection was made to analyse model performance.

Conclusion: This proof-of-concept study showed initial credibility in using ML algorithms to predict mortality in burn patients. The sample size was small and future studies are needed with larger sample sizes, further variable selections and prospective testing of the algorithms.

Lay summary: Burn injuries are one of the most common traumatic injuries especially in countries with limited prevention and healthcare resources. To treat a patient with large burns who has been admitted to an intensive care unit, it is often necessary to assess the risk of a fatal outcome. Physicians traditionally use simplified scores to calculate risks. One commonly used score, the Baux score, uses age of the patient and the size of the burn to predict the risk of death. Adding the factor of inhalation injury, the score is then called the revised Baux score. However, there are a number of additional causes that can influence the risk of fatal outcomes that Baux scores do not take into account. Machine learning is a method of data modelling where the system learns to predict outcomes based on previous cases and is a branch of artificial intelligence. In this study we evaluated several machine learning methods for outcome prediction in patients admitted for burn injury. We gathered data on 93 patients at admission to the intensive care unit and our experiments show that machine learning methods can reach an accuracy comparable with Baux scores in calculating the risk of fatal outcomes. This study represents a proof of principle and future studies on larger patient series are required to verify our results as well as to evaluate the methods on patients in real-life situations.