Development and validation of a machine learning-based model for post-sepsis frailty

Background The development of post-sepsis frailty is a common and significant problem, but it is a challenge to predict. Methods Data for deep learning were extracted from a national multicentre prospective observational cohort of patients with sepsis in Korea between September 2019 and December 2021. The primary outcome was frailty at survival discharge, defined as a clinical frailty score on the Clinical Frailty Scale ≥5. We developed a deep learning model for predicting frailty after sepsis by 10 variables routinely collected at the recognition of sepsis. With cross-validation, we trained and tuned six machine learning models, including four conventional and two neural network models. Moreover, we computed the importance of each predictor variable in the model. We measured the performance of these models using a temporal validation data set. Results A total of 8518 patients were included in the analysis; 5463 (64.1%) were frail, and 3055 (35.9%) were non-frail at discharge. The Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) (0.8175) and accuracy (0.7414). To confirm the generalisation performance of artificial intelligence in predicting frailty at discharge, we conducted external validation with the COVID-19 data set. The XGB still showed a good performance with an AUC of 0.7668. The machine learning model could predict frailty despite the disparity in data distribution. Conclusion The machine learning-based model developed for predicting frailty after sepsis achieved high performance with limited baseline clinical parameters.