Artificial intelligence prediction of adverse outcomes in emergency department patients with hyperglycemic crises in real-time

Background Hyperglycemic crises are associated with high morbidity and mortality. Previous studies proposed methods for predicting adverse outcome in hyperglycemic crises, artificial intelligence (AI) has however never been tried. We implemented an AI prediction model integrated with hospital information system (HIS) to clarify this issue. Methods We included 3,715 patients with hyperglycemic crises from emergency departments (ED) between 2009 and 2018. Patients were randomized into a 70%/30% split for AI model training and testing. Twenty-two feature variables from their electronic medical records were collected, and multilayer perceptron (MLP) was used to construct an AI prediction model to predict sepsis or septic shock, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and all-cause mortality within 1 month. Comparisons of the performance among random forest, logistic regression, support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), and MLP algorithms were also done. Results Using the MLP model, the areas under the curves (AUCs) were 0.808 for sepsis or septic shock, 0.688 for ICU admission, and 0.770 for all-cause mortality. MLP had the best performance in predicting sepsis or septic shock and all-cause mortality, compared with logistic regression, SVM, KNN, and LightGBM. Furthermore, we integrated the AI prediction model with the HIS to assist physicians for decision making in real-time. Conclusions A real-time AI prediction model is a promising method to assist physicians in predicting adverse outcomes in ED patients with hyperglycemic crises. Further studies on the impact on clinical practice and patient outcome are warranted.