Predicting Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia with Machine Learning

Objective Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is the most common and fatal nosocomial infection in intensive care units (ICUs). Existing methods for identifying VAP display low accuracy, and their use may delay antimicrobial therapy. ​VAP diagnostics derived from machine learning methods that utilize electronic health record data have not yet been explored. The objective of this study is to compare the performance of a variety of machine learning models trained to predict whether VAP will be diagnosed during the patient stay.Methods A retrospective study examined data from 6,129 adult ICU encounters lasting at least 48 hours following the initiation of mechanical ventilation. The gold standard was the presence of a diagnostic code for VAP. Five different machine learning models were trained to predict VAP 48 hours after initiation of mechanical ventilation. Model performance was evaluated with regard to area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) on a 10% hold-out test set. Feature importance was measured in terms of Shapley values.Results The highest performing model achieved an AUROC value of 0.827. The most important features for the best-performing model were the length of time on mechanical ventilation, presence of antibiotics, sputum test frequency, and most recent Glasgow Coma Scale assessment.Discussion Supervised machine learning using patient electronic health record data is promising for VAP diagnosis and warrants further validation. Conclusion This tool has the potential to aid the timely diagnosis of VAP.