Development and application of survey-based artificial intelligence for clinical decision support in managing infectious diseases: A pilot study on a hospital in central Vietnam

IntroductionIn this study, we developed a simplified artificial intelligence to support the clinical decision-making of medical personnel in a resource-limited setting.MethodsWe selected seven infectious disease categories that impose a heavy disease burden in the central Vietnam region: mosquito-borne disease, acute gastroenteritis, respiratory tract infection, pulmonary tuberculosis, sepsis, primary nervous system infection, and viral hepatitis. We developed a set of questionnaires to collect information on the current symptoms and history of patients suspected to have infectious diseases. We used data collected from 1,129 patients to develop and test a diagnostic model. We used XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost algorithms to create artificial intelligence for clinical decision support. We used a 4-fold cross-validation method to validate the artificial intelligence model. After 4-fold cross-validation, we tested artificial intelligence models on a separate test dataset and estimated diagnostic accuracy for each model.ResultsWe recruited 1,129 patients for final analyses. Artificial intelligence developed by the CatBoost algorithm showed the best performance, with 87.61% accuracy and an F1-score of 87.71. The F1-score of the CatBoost model by disease entity ranged from 0.80 to 0.97. Diagnostic accuracy was the lowest for sepsis and the highest for central nervous system infection.ConclusionSimplified artificial intelligence could be helpful in clinical decision support in settings with limited resources.