Electronic Medical Record-Based Machine Learning Approach to Predict the Risk of 30-Day Adverse Cardiac Events After Invasive Coronary Treatment: Machine Learning Model Development and Validation

Abstract

Background: Although there is a growing interest in prediction models based on electronic medical records (EMRs) to identify patients at risk of adverse cardiac events following invasive coronary treatment, robust models fully utilizing EMR data are limited.

Objective: We aimed to develop and validate machine learning (ML) models by using diverse fields of EMR to predict the risk of 30-day adverse cardiac events after percutaneous intervention or bypass surgery.

Methods: EMR data of 5,184,565 records of 16,793 patients at a quaternary hospital between 2006 and 2016 were categorized into static basic (eg, demographics), dynamic time-series (eg, laboratory values), and cardiac-specific data (eg, coronary angiography). The data were randomly split into training, tuning, and testing sets in a ratio of 3:1:1. Each model was evaluated with 5-fold cross-validation and with an external EMR-based cohort at a tertiary hospital. Logistic regression (LR), random forest (RF), gradient boosting machine (GBM), and feedforward neural network (FNN) algorithms were applied. The primary outcome was 30-day mortality following invasive treatment.

Results: GBM showed the best performance with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.99; RF had a similar AUROC of 0.98. AUROCs of FNN and LR were 0.96 and 0.93, respectively. GBM had the highest area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.80, and the AUPRCs of RF, LR, and FNN were 0.73, 0.68, and 0.63, respectively. All models showed low Brier scores of <0.1 as well as highly fitted calibration plots, indicating a good fit of the ML-based models. On external validation, the GBM model demonstrated maximal performance with an AUROC of 0.90, while FNN had an AUROC of 0.85. The AUROCs of LR and RF were slightly lower at 0.80 and 0.79, respectively. The AUPRCs of GBM, LR, and FNN were similar at 0.47, 0.43, and 0.41, respectively, while that of RF was lower at 0.33. Among the categories in the GBM model, time-series dynamic data demonstrated a high AUROC of >0.95, contributing majorly to the excellent results.

Conclusions: Exploiting the diverse fields of the EMR data set, the ML-based 30-day adverse cardiac event prediction models demonstrated outstanding results, and the applied framework could be generalized for various health care prediction models.

Keywords: adverse cardiac event; big data; coronary artery disease; electronic medical record; machine learning; mortality; prediction.