Mortality Prediction Model for COVID-19, Pneumonia, and Mechanically Ventilated ICU Patients: A Retrospective Study

Background: The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a machine learning-based algorithm which accurately predicts mortality in COVID-19, pneumonia, and mechanically ventilated patients. Methods: A retrospective study of 53,001 total ICU patients, including 9,166 patients with pneumonia and 25,895 mechanically ventilated patients, was performed on the MIMIC dataset. An additional retrospective analysis was performed on a community hospital dataset containing 114 patients positive for SARS-COV-2 by PCR test. The outcome of interest was in-hospital patient mortality. Findings: W hen trained and tested on the MIMIC dataset, the XGBoost predictor obtained AUROCs of 0.88, 0.86, 0.81, and 0.78 for mortality prediction on mechanically ventilated patients at 12-, 24-, 48-, and 72- hour windows, respectively, and AUROCs of 0.86, 0.82, 0.79, and 0.75 for mortality prediction on pneumonia patients at 12-, 24-, 48-, and 72- hour windows, respectively. The predictor outperformed the qSOFA risk score at all prediction windows. When tested on the community hospital dataset, the predictor obtained AUROCs of 0.934, 0.927, 0.916, and 0.916 for mortality prediction on COVID-19 PCR positive patients at 12-, 24-, 48-, and 72- hour windows, respectively, outperforming the qSOFA risk score at all prediction windows. Interpretation: This machine learning-based algorithm is a useful predictive tool for anticipating patient mortality at clinically useful windows of 12, 24, 48, and 72 hours in advance, and is capable of accurate mortality prediction for mechanically ventilated patients as well as those diagnosed with pneumonia and COVID-19. Trial Registration : This study has been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov under study number NCT 04358510. Funding Statement: N/A Declaration of Interests: All authors who have affiliations listed with Dascena (Oakland, California, USA) are employees or contractors of Dascena. All other authors declare no conflicts of interest Ethics Approval Statement: Studies performed on the de-identified data constitute non-human subject studies, and therefore, our study did not require Institutional Review Board approval.