Predicting the outcome for patients in a heart transplantation queue using deep learning

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2017 Jul:2017:74-77. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2017.8036766.

Abstract

Heart transplantations have made it possible to extend the median survival time to 12 years for patients with end-stage heart diseases. This operation is unfortunately limited by the availability of donor organs and patients have to wait on average about 200 days in a waiting list before being operated. This waiting time varies considerably across the patients. In this paper, we studied the outcome for patients entering a transplantation waiting list using deep learning techniques. We implemented a model in the form of two-layer neural networks and we predicted the outcome as still waiting, transplanted or dead in the waiting list, at three different time points: 180 days, 365 days, and 730 days. As data source, we used the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) registry, where we extracted adult patients (>17 years) from January 2000 to December 2011. We trained our model using the Keras framework, and we report F1 macro scores of respectively 0.674, 0.680, and 0.680 compared to a baseline of 0.271. We also applied a backward elimination procedure, using our neural network, to extract the 10 most significant parameters predicting the patient status for the three different time points.

MeSH terms

  • Heart Transplantation*
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • Registries
  • Tissue and Organ Procurement
  • Waiting Lists