Models for predicting acute myocardial infarction (AMI) at the prehospital stage were developed and their efficacy compared, based on variables identified from a nationwide systematic emergency medical service (EMS) registry using conventional statistical methods and machine learning algorithms. Patients in the EMS cardiovascular registry aged >15 years who were transferred from the public EMS to emergency departments in Korea from January 2016 to December 2018 were enrolled. Two datasets were constructed according to the hierarchical structure of the registry. A total of 184,577 patients (Dataset 1) were included in the final analysis. Among them, 72,439 patients (Dataset 2) were suspected to have AMI at prehospital stage. Between the models derived using the conventional logistic regression method, the B-type model incorporated AMI-specific variables from the A-type model and exhibited a superior discriminative ability (p = 0.02). The models that used extreme gradient boosting and a multilayer perceptron yielded a higher predictive performance than the conventional logistic regression-based models for analyses that used both datasets. Each machine learning algorithm yielded different classification lists of the 10 most important features. Therefore, prediction models that use nationwide prehospital data and are developed with appropriate structures can improve the identification of patients who require timely AMI management.
Keywords: acute myocardial infarction; machine learning; nationwide prehospital record; prediction.