Cited by 1,086Machine Learning in HealthcareAcute Kidney Injury ResearchArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare

A clinically applicable approach to continuous prediction of future acute kidney injury

Open access
Tomašev, Nenad, Glorot, Xavier, Rae, Jack W., Zielinski, Michal, Askham, Harry, Saraiva, Andre, Mottram, Anne, Meyer, Clemens +19 more·2019·Nature

Abstract

The early prediction of deterioration could have an important role in supporting healthcare professionals, as an estimated 11% of deaths in hospital follow a failure to promptly recognize and treat deteriorating patients 1. To achieve this goal requires predictions of patient risk that are continuously updated and accurate, and delivered at an individual level with sufficient context and enough time to act. Here we develop a deep learning approach for the continuous risk prediction of future deterioration in patients, building on recent work that models adverse events from electronic health records 2-17 and using acute kidney injury-a common and potentially life-threatening condition 18-as an exemplar. Our model was developed on a large, longitudinal dataset of electronic health records that cover diverse clinical environments, comprising 703,782 adult patients across 172 inpatient and 1,062 outpatient sites. Our model predicts 55.8% of all inpatient episodes of acute kidney injury, and 90.2% of all acute kidney injuries that required subsequent administration of dialysis, with a lead time of up to 48 h and a ratio of 2 false alerts for every true alert. In addition to predicting future acute kidney injury, our model provides confidence assessments and a list of the clinical features that are most salient to each prediction, alongside predicted future trajectories for clinically relevant blood tests 9. Although the recognition and prompt treatment of acute kidney injury is known to be challenging, our approach may offer opportunities for identifying patients at risk within a time window that enables early treatment.

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Crossref · 10.1038/s41586-019-1390-1

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  • Many research groups have tackled early prediction of AKI using electronic health records data, but no model so far explains the rationale behind specific predictions despite a clear need for explainable and actionable predictions.

    “Many research groups have tackled early prediction of AKI using electronic health records (EHR) data [8–11], but no model so far explains the rationale behind specific predictions despite a clear need for explainable and actionable predictions [6, 12].”

    From Machine learning model for early prediction of acute kidney injury (AKI) in pediatric critical care (2021) · cites this paper as [9]

    The paper supports the need for actionable predictions with clinical context, but contradicts the claim that no model explains individual predictions. In its main text (page unavailable), it says its model identifies the factors most salient to each risk prediction; it also describes providing a list of salient clinical features for each prediction. (LLM, conf=0.88)

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  • The AKI dataset was predominantly made up of data from older non-Black men; average age was 62 years old and over 90% were males.

    “it was predominantly made up of data from older non-Black men; the average age was 62 years old and over 90% were males.”

    From Bias in artificial intelligence algorithms and recommendations for mitigation (2023) · cites this paper as [27]

    The main text reports that 6.38% of patients were female, supporting the claim that over 90% were male. Extended Data Table 5 gives average ages of 61.3 and 64.2 years for cohorts before and after a temporal split, but those figures do not establish an overall average of 62. The retrieved passages do not establish that patients were predominantly non-Black. (LLM, conf=0.80)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • An AKI prediction algorithm was developed using clinical data from the US Department of Veteran Affairs.

    “An example of this includes an algorithm developed to predict acute kidney injury (AKI) using clinical data from the US Department of Veteran Affairs [27].”
  • The AKI dataset contained data from over 700,000 patients from multiple centers.

    “Though the dataset used to develop the algorithm was large and diverse, containing data from over 700,000 patients from multiple centers”
  • AI models that use EHR, laboratory, and physiological data predict outcomes such as acute kidney injury and sepsis or critical-care deterioration.

    “Models that use EHR, laboratory, and physiological data predict outcomes such as acute kidney injury [14] and sepsis or critical-care deterioration [15,16].”

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. [29]Schulam P and Saria S, “ Reliable decision support using counterfactual models,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, (Guyon I, Luxburg U, Bengio S, Wallach H, Fergus R, Vishwanathan S, and Garnett R, eds.), vol. 30, pp. 1697– 1708, 2762017.
  2. [34]Zilly JG, Srivastava RK, Koutník J, and Schmidhuber J, “ Recurrent highway net-works,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (Precupand D Teh YW, eds.), vol. 70, pp. 4189– 4198, 2017.
  3. [38]Lei T and Zhang Y, “ Training RNNs as fast as CNNs,” arXiv Preprint, arXiv:1709.02755, 2017. · arXiv
  4. [44]Caruana R, Baluja S, and Mitchell T, “ Using the future to “sort out” the present: Rankprop and multitask learning for medical risk evaluation,” in Advances in Neural Infor-mation Processing Systems (Mozer M, Jordan M, and Petsche T, eds.), vol. 9, pp. 959– 965, 1996.
  5. [50]Platt JC, “ Probabilistic outputs for support vector machines and comparisons to regular-ized likelihood methods,” in Advances in Large-Margin Classifiers, pp. 61– 74, MIT Press, 1999.

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Authors
Tomašev, N., Glorot, X., Rae, J. W., Zielinski, M., Askham, H., Saraiva, A., Mottram, A., Meyer, C., Ravuri, S., Protsyuk, I., Connell, A., Hughes, C. O., Karthikesalingam, A., Cornebise, J., Montgomery, H., Rees, G., Laing, C., Baker, C. R., Peterson, K., Reeves, R., Hassabis, D., King, D., Suleyman, M., Back, T., Nielson, C., Ledsam, J. R., & Mohamed, S.
Affiliations
  • Google DeepMind (United Kingdom) (GB)
  • University College London (GB)
  • University College Hospital (GB)
  • United States Department of Veterans Affairs (US)
  • University of Utah (US)
  • University of Nevada, Reno (US)
Corresponding author
  • Tomašev, Nenad
  • Ledsam, Joseph R.
Venue
Nature
Published
2019-07-31
Volume
572
Issue
7767
Pages
116-119
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
OpenAlex
W2964696298
Cited by
1,086
References
60
Citations by year
2026: 123 · 2025: 149 · 2024: 122 · 2023: 150 · 2022: 154 · 2021: 169 · 2020: 180 · 2019: 39
FWCI
61.95
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
Funders
National Institutes of Health (VA999999)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Nephrology › Acute Kidney Injury Research
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Keywords
acute kidney injury, deep learning, electronic health records, clinical deterioration, dialysis requirement, confidence estimation, false alarms, clinical decision support
MeSH terms
Adolescent, Adult, Aged, Aged, 80 and over, Computer Simulation, False Positive Reactions, Female, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, ROC Curve, Risk Assessment, Clinical Laboratory Techniques, Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive, Uncertainty, Young Adult, Acute Kidney Injury, Datasets as Topic

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