Improving Stroke Risk Prediction in the General Population: A Comparative Assessment of Common Clinical Rules, a New Multimorbid Index, and Machine-Learning-Based Algorithms.

BACKGROUND: There are few large studies examining and predicting the diversified cardiovascular/noncardiovascular comorbidity relationships with stroke. We investigated stroke risks in a very large prospective cohort of patients with multimorbidity, using two common clinical rules, a clinical multimorbid index and a machine-learning (ML) approach, accounting for the complex relationships among variables, including the dynamic nature of changing risk factors. METHODS: We studied a prospective U.S. cohort of 3,435,224 patients from medical databases in a 2-year investigation. Stroke outcomes were examined in relationship to diverse multimorbid conditions, demographic variables, and other inputs, with ML accounting for the dynamic nature of changing multimorbidity risk factors, two clinical risk scores, and a clinical multimorbid index. RESULTS: Common clinical risk scores had moderate and comparable c indices with stroke outcomes in the training and external validation samples (validation-CHADS2: c index 0.812, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.808-0.815; CHA2DS2-VASc: c index 0.809, 95% CI 0.805-0.812). A clinical multimorbid index had higher discriminant validity values for both the training/external validation samples (validation: c index 0.850, 95% CI 0.847-0.853). The ML-based algorithms yielded the highest discriminant validity values for the gradient boosting/neural network logistic regression formulations with no significant differences among the ML approaches (validation for logistic regression: c index 0.866, 95% CI 0.856-0.876). Calibration of the ML-based formulation was satisfactory across a wide range of predicted probabilities. Decision curve analysis demonstrated that clinical utility for the ML-based formulation was better than that for the two current clinical rules and the newly developed multimorbid tool. Also, ML models and clinical stroke risk scores were more clinically useful than the "treat all" strategy. CONCLUSION: Complex relationships of various comorbidities uncovered using a ML approach for diverse (and dynamic) multimorbidity changes have major consequences for stroke risk prediction. This approach may facilitate automated approaches for dynamic risk stratification in the significant presence of multimorbidity, helping in the decision-making process for risk assessment and integrated/holistic management.

Automated Assessment of Brain CT After Cardiac Arrest-An Observational Derivation/Validation Cohort Study.

OBJECTIVES: Prognostication of outcome is an essential step in defining therapeutic goals after cardiac arrest. Gray-white-matter ratio obtained from brain CT can predict poor outcome. However, manual placement of regions of interest is a potential source of error and interrater variability. Our objective was to assess the performance of poor outcome prediction by automated quantification of changes in brain CTs after cardiac arrest. DESIGN: Observational, derivation/validation cohort study design. Outcome was determined using the Cerebral Performance Category upon hospital discharge. Poor outcome was defined as death or unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/coma. CTs were automatically decomposed using coregistration with a brain atlas. SETTING: ICUs at a large, academic hospital with circulatory arrest center. PATIENTS: We identified 433 cardiac arrest patients from a large previously established database with brain CTs within 10 days after cardiac arrest. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Five hundred sixteen brain CTs were evaluated (derivation cohort n = 309, validation cohort n = 207). Patients with poor outcome had significantly lower radiodensities in gray matter regions. Automated GWR_si (putamen/posterior limb of internal capsule) was performed with an area under the curve of 0.86 (95%-CI: 0.80-0.93) for CTs taken later than 24 hours after cardiac arrest (similar performance in the validation cohort). Poor outcome (Cerebral Performance Category 4-5) was predicted with a specificity of 100% (95% CI, 87-100%, derivation; 88-100%, validation) at a threshold of less than 1.10 and a sensitivity of 49% (95% CI, 36-58%, derivation) and 38% (95% CI, 27-50%, validation) for CTs later than 24 hours after cardiac arrest. Sensitivity and area under the curve were lower for CTs performed within 24 hours after cardiac arrest. CONCLUSIONS: Automated gray-white-matter ratio from brain CT is a promising tool for prediction of poor neurologic outcome after cardiac arrest with high specificity and low-to-moderate sensitivity. Prediction by gray-white-matter ratio at the basal ganglia level performed best. Sensitivity increased considerably for CTs performed later than 24 hours after cardiac arrest.

Improved individual and population-level HbA1c estimation using CGM data and patient characteristics.

Machine learning and linear regression models using CGM and participant data reduced HbA1c estimation error by up to 26% compared to the GMI formula, and exhibit superior performance in estimating the median of HbA1c at the cohort level, potentially of value for remote clinical trials interrupted by COVID-19.

Performance Assessment of Certain Machine Learning Models for Predicting the Major Depressive Disorder among IT Professionals during Pandemic times.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the most common mental disorder in the present day as all individuals' lives, irrespective of being employed or unemployed, is going through the depression phase at least once in their lifetime. In simple terms, it is a mood disturbance that can persist for an individual for more than a few weeks to months. In MDD, in most cases, the individuals do not consult a professional, and even if being consulted, the results are not significant as the individuals find it challenging to identify whether they are depressed or not. Depression, most of the time, cooccurs with anxiety and leads to suicide in few cases, among the employees, who are about to handle the pressure at work and home and mostly unnoticing such problems. This is why this work aims to analyze the IT employees who are mostly working with targets. The artificial neural network, which is modeled loosely like the brain, has proved in recent days that it can perform better than most of the classification algorithms. This study has implemented the multilayered neural perceptron and experimented with the backpropagation technique over the data samples collected from IT professionals. This study aims to develop a model that can classify depressed individuals from those who are not depressed effectively with the data collected from them manually and through sensors. The results show that deep-MLP with backpropagation outperforms other machine learning-based models for effective classification.

Cost-Effective Machine Learning Based Clinical Pre-Test Probability Strategy for DVT Diagnosis in Neurological Intensive Care Unit.

In order to overcome the shortage of the current costly DVT diagnosis and reduce the waste of valuable healthcare resources, we proposed a new diagnostic approach based on machine learning pre-test prediction models using EHRs. We examined the sociodemographic and clinical factors in the prediction of DVT with 518 NICU admitted patients, including 189 patients who eventually developed DVT. We used cross-validation on the training data to determine the optimal parameters, and finally, the applied ROC analysis is adopted to evaluate the predictive strength of each model. Two models (GLM and SVM) with the strongest ROC were selected for DVT prediction, based on which, we optimized the current intervention and diagnostic process of DVT and examined the performance of the proposed approach through simulations. The use of machine learning based pre-test prediction models can simplify and improve the intervention and diagnostic process of patients in NICU with suspected DVT, and reduce the valuable healthcare resource occupation/usage and medical costs.

Precision Assessment of COVID-19 Phenotypes Using Large-Scale Clinic Visit Audio Recordings: Harnessing the Power of Patient Voice.

COVID-19 cases are exponentially increasing worldwide; however, its clinical phenotype remains unclear. Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning approaches may yield key methods to rapidly identify individuals at a high risk of COVID-19 and to understand key symptoms upon clinical manifestation and presentation. Data on such symptoms may not be accurately synthesized into patient records owing to the pressing need to treat patients in overburdened health care settings. In this scenario, clinicians may focus on documenting widely reported symptoms that indicate a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19, albeit at the expense of infrequently reported symptoms. While NLP solutions can play a key role in generating clinical phenotypes of COVID-19, they are limited by the resulting limitations in data from electronic health records (EHRs). A comprehensive record of clinic visits is required-audio recordings may be the answer. A recording of clinic visits represents a more comprehensive record of patient-reported symptoms. If done at scale, a combination of data from the EHR and recordings of clinic visits can be used to power NLP and machine learning models, thus rapidly generating a clinical phenotype of COVID-19. We propose the generation of a pipeline extending from audio or video recordings of clinic visits to establish a model that factors in clinical symptoms and predict COVID-19 incidence. With vast amounts of available data, we believe that a prediction model can be rapidly developed to promote the accurate screening of individuals at a high risk of COVID-19 and to identify patient characteristics that predict a greater risk of a more severe infection. If clinical encounters are recorded and our NLP model is adequately refined, benchtop virologic findings would be better informed. While clinic visit recordings are not the panacea for this pandemic, they are a low-cost option with many potential benefits, which have recently begun to be explored.

Recommendations for the safe, effective use of adaptive CDS in the US healthcare system: an AMIA position paper.

The development and implementation of clinical decision support (CDS) that trains itself and adapts its algorithms based on new data-here referred to as Adaptive CDS-present unique challenges and considerations. Although Adaptive CDS represents an expected progression from earlier work, the activities needed to appropriately manage and support the establishment and evolution of Adaptive CDS require new, coordinated initiatives and oversight that do not currently exist. In this AMIA position paper, the authors describe current and emerging challenges to the safe use of Adaptive CDS and lay out recommendations for the effective management and monitoring of Adaptive CDS.

Risk Stratification for Early Detection of Diabetes and Hypertension in Resource-Limited Settings: Machine Learning Analysis.

BACKGROUND: The impending scale up of noncommunicable disease screening programs in low- and middle-income countries coupled with limited health resources require that such programs be as accurate as possible at identifying patients at high risk. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to develop machine learning-based risk stratification algorithms for diabetes and hypertension that are tailored for the at-risk population served by community-based screening programs in low-resource settings. METHODS: We trained and tested our models by using data from 2278 patients collected by community health workers through door-to-door and camp-based screenings in the urban slums of Hyderabad, India between July 14, 2015 and April 21, 2018. We determined the best models for predicting short-term (2-month) risk of diabetes and hypertension (a model for diabetes and a model for hypertension) and compared these models to previously developed risk scores from the United States and the United Kingdom by using prediction accuracy as characterized by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the number of false negatives. RESULTS: We found that models based on random forest had the highest prediction accuracy for both diseases and were able to outperform the US and UK risk scores in terms of AUC by 35.5% for diabetes (improvement of 0.239 from 0.671 to 0.910) and 13.5% for hypertension (improvement of 0.094 from 0.698 to 0.792). For a fixed screening specificity of 0.9, the random forest model was able to reduce the expected number of false negatives by 620 patients per 1000 screenings for diabetes and 220 patients per 1000 screenings for hypertension. This improvement reduces the cost of incorrect risk stratification by US $1.99 (or 35%) per screening for diabetes and US $1.60 (or 21%) per screening for hypertension. CONCLUSIONS: In the next decade, health systems in many countries are planning to spend significant resources on noncommunicable disease screening programs and our study demonstrates that machine learning models can be leveraged by these programs to effectively utilize limited resources by improving risk stratification.

Risk factors and socio-economic burden in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma operation: a machine learning based analysis.

BACKGROUND: Surgical resection is the major way to cure pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). However, this operation is complex, and the peri-operative risk is high, making patients more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU). Therefore, establishing a risk model that predicts admission to ICU is meaningful in preventing patients from post-operation deterioration and potentially reducing socio-economic burden. METHODS: We retrospectively collected 120 clinical features from 1242 PDAC patients, including demographic data, pre-operative and intra-operative blood tests, in-hospital duration, and ICU status. Machine learning pipelines, including Supporting Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression, and Lasso Regression, were employed to choose an optimal model in predicting ICU admission. Ordinary least-squares regression (OLS) and Lasso Regression were adopted in the correlation analysis of post-operative bleeding, total in-hospital duration, and discharge costs. RESULTS: SVM model achieved higher performance than the other two models, resulted in an AU-ROC of 0.80. The features, such as age, duration of operation, monocyte count, and intra-operative partial arterial pressure of oxygen (PaO2), are risk factors in the ICU admission. The protective factors include RBC count, analgesic pump dexmedetomidine (DEX), and intra-operative maintenance of DEX. Basophil percentage, duration of the operation, and total infusion volume were risk variables for staying in ICU. The bilirubin, CA125, and pre-operative albumin were associated with the post-operative bleeding volume. The operation duration was the most important factor for discharge costs, while pre-lymphocyte percentage and the absolute count are responsible for less cost. CONCLUSIONS: We observed that several new indicators such as DEX, monocyte count, basophil percentage, and intra-operative PaO2 showed a good predictive effect on the possibility of admission to ICU and duration of stay in ICU. This work provided an essential reference for indication in advance to PDAC operation.

Federated Learning on Clinical Benchmark Data: Performance Assessment.

BACKGROUND: Federated learning (FL) is a newly proposed machine-learning method that uses a decentralized dataset. Since data transfer is not necessary for the learning process in FL, there is a significant advantage in protecting personal privacy. Therefore, many studies are being actively conducted in the applications of FL for diverse areas. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to evaluate the reliability and performance of FL using three benchmark datasets, including a clinical benchmark dataset. METHODS: To evaluate FL in a realistic setting, we implemented FL using a client-server architecture with Python. The implemented client-server version of the FL software was deployed to Amazon Web Services. Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST), Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III (MIMIC-III), and electrocardiogram (ECG) datasets were used to evaluate the performance of FL. To test FL in a realistic setting, the MNIST dataset was split into 10 different clients, with one digit for each client. In addition, we conducted four different experiments according to basic, imbalanced, skewed, and a combination of imbalanced and skewed data distributions. We also compared the performance of FL to that of the state-of-the-art method with respect to in-hospital mortality using the MIMIC-III dataset. Likewise, we conducted experiments comparing basic and imbalanced data distributions using MIMIC-III and ECG data. RESULTS: FL on the basic MNIST dataset with 10 clients achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.997 and an F1-score of 0.946. The experiment with the imbalanced MNIST dataset achieved an AUROC of 0.995 and an F1-score of 0.921. The experiment with the skewed MNIST dataset achieved an AUROC of 0.992 and an F1-score of 0.905. Finally, the combined imbalanced and skewed experiment achieved an AUROC of 0.990 and an F1-score of 0.891. The basic FL on in-hospital mortality using MIMIC-III data achieved an AUROC of 0.850 and an F1-score of 0.944, while the experiment with the imbalanced MIMIC-III dataset achieved an AUROC of 0.850 and an F1-score of 0.943. For ECG classification, the basic FL achieved an AUROC of 0.938 and an F1-score of 0.807, and the imbalanced ECG dataset achieved an AUROC of 0.943 and an F1-score of 0.807. CONCLUSIONS: FL demonstrated comparative performance on different benchmark datasets. In addition, FL demonstrated reliable performance in cases where the distribution was imbalanced, skewed, and extreme, reflecting the real-life scenario in which data distributions from various hospitals are different. FL can achieve high performance while maintaining privacy protection because there is no requirement to centralize the data.

Automated Smart Home Assessment to Support Pain Management: Multiple Methods Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Poorly managed pain can lead to substance use disorders, depression, suicide, worsening health, and increased use of health services. Most pain assessments occur in clinical settings away from patients' natural environments. Advances in smart home technology may allow observation of pain in the home setting. Smart homes recognizing human behaviors may be useful for quantifying functional pain interference, thereby creating new ways of assessing pain and supporting people living with pain. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine if a smart home can detect pain-related behaviors to perform automated assessment and support intervention for persons with chronic pain. METHODS: A multiple methods, secondary data analysis was conducted using historic ambient sensor data and weekly nursing assessment data from 11 independent older adults reporting pain across 1-2 years of smart home monitoring. A qualitative approach was used to interpret sensor-based data of 27 unique pain events to support clinician-guided training of a machine learning model. A periodogram was used to calculate circadian rhythm strength, and a random forest containing 100 trees was employed to train a machine learning model to recognize pain-related behaviors. The model extracted 550 behavioral markers for each sensor-based data segment. These were treated as both a binary classification problem (event, control) and a regression problem. RESULTS: We found 13 clinically relevant behaviors, revealing 6 pain-related behavioral qualitative themes. Quantitative results were classified using a clinician-guided random forest technique that yielded a classification accuracy of 0.70, sensitivity of 0.72, specificity of 0.69, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.756, and area under the precision-recall curve of 0.777 in comparison to using standard anomaly detection techniques without clinician guidance (0.16 accuracy achieved; P<.001). The regression formulation achieved moderate correlation, with r=0.42. CONCLUSIONS: Findings of this secondary data analysis reveal that a pain-assessing smart home may recognize pain-related behaviors. Utilizing clinicians' real-world knowledge when developing pain-assessing machine learning models improves the model's performance. A larger study focusing on pain-related behaviors is warranted to improve and test model performance.

Prognostic Assessment of COVID-19 in the Intensive Care Unit by Machine Learning Methods: Model Development and Validation.

BACKGROUND: Patients with COVID-19 in the intensive care unit (ICU) have a high mortality rate, and methods to assess patients' prognosis early and administer precise treatment are of great significance. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to use machine learning to construct a model for the analysis of risk factors and prediction of mortality among ICU patients with COVID-19. METHODS: In this study, 123 patients with COVID-19 in the ICU of Vulcan Hill Hospital were retrospectively selected from the database, and the data were randomly divided into a training data set (n=98) and test data set (n=25) with a 4:1 ratio. Significance tests, correlation analysis, and factor analysis were used to screen 100 potential risk factors individually. Conventional logistic regression methods and four machine learning algorithms were used to construct the risk prediction model for the prognosis of patients with COVID-19 in the ICU. The performance of these machine learning models was measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Interpretation and evaluation of the risk prediction model were performed using calibration curves, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), etc, to ensure its stability and reliability. The outcome was based on the ICU deaths recorded from the database. RESULTS: Layer-by-layer screening of 100 potential risk factors finally revealed 8 important risk factors that were included in the risk prediction model: lymphocyte percentage, prothrombin time, lactate dehydrogenase, total bilirubin, eosinophil percentage, creatinine, neutrophil percentage, and albumin level. Finally, an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model established with the 8 important risk factors showed the best recognition ability in the training set of 5-fold cross validation (AUC=0.86) and the verification queue (AUC=0.92). The calibration curve showed that the risk predicted by the model was in good agreement with the actual risk. In addition, using the SHAP and LIME algorithms, feature interpretation and sample prediction interpretation algorithms of the XGBoost black box model were implemented. Additionally, the model was translated into a web-based risk calculator that is freely available for public usage. CONCLUSIONS: The 8-factor XGBoost model predicts risk of death in ICU patients with COVID-19 well; it initially demonstrates stability and can be used effectively to predict COVID-19 prognosis in ICU patients.

A Racially Unbiased, Machine Learning Approach to Prediction of Mortality: Algorithm Development Study.

BACKGROUND: Racial disparities in health care are well documented in the United States. As machine learning methods become more common in health care settings, it is important to ensure that these methods do not contribute to racial disparities through biased predictions or differential accuracy across racial groups. OBJECTIVE: The goal of the research was to assess a machine learning algorithm intentionally developed to minimize bias in in-hospital mortality predictions between white and nonwhite patient groups. METHODS: Bias was minimized through preprocessing of algorithm training data. We performed a retrospective analysis of electronic health record data from patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) at a large academic health center between 2001 and 2012, drawing data from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III database. Patients were included if they had at least 10 hours of available measurements after ICU admission, had at least one of every measurement used for model prediction, and had recorded race/ethnicity data. Bias was assessed through the equal opportunity difference. Model performance in terms of bias and accuracy was compared with the Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), the Simplified Acute Physiology Score II (SAPS II), and the Acute Physiologic Assessment and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE). RESULTS: The machine learning algorithm was found to be more accurate than all comparators, with a higher sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristic. The machine learning algorithm was found to be unbiased (equal opportunity difference 0.016, P=.20). APACHE was also found to be unbiased (equal opportunity difference 0.019, P=.11), while SAPS II and MEWS were found to have significant bias (equal opportunity difference 0.038, P=.006 and equal opportunity difference 0.074, P<.001, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: This study indicates there may be significant racial bias in commonly used severity scoring systems and that machine learning algorithms may reduce bias while improving on the accuracy of these methods.

Automatic Grading of Stroke Symptoms for Rapid Assessment Using Optimized Machine Learning and 4-Limb Kinematics: Clinical Validation Study.

BACKGROUND: Subtle abnormal motor signs are indications of serious neurological diseases. Although neurological deficits require fast initiation of treatment in a restricted time, it is difficult for nonspecialists to detect and objectively assess the symptoms. In the clinical environment, diagnoses and decisions are based on clinical grading methods, including the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score or the Medical Research Council (MRC) score, which have been used to measure motor weakness. Objective grading in various environments is necessitated for consistent agreement among patients, caregivers, paramedics, and medical staff to facilitate rapid diagnoses and dispatches to appropriate medical centers. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we aimed to develop an autonomous grading system for stroke patients. We investigated the feasibility of our new system to assess motor weakness and grade NIHSS and MRC scores of 4 limbs, similar to the clinical examinations performed by medical staff. METHODS: We implemented an automatic grading system composed of a measuring unit with wearable sensors and a grading unit with optimized machine learning. Inertial sensors were attached to measure subtle weaknesses caused by paralysis of upper and lower limbs. We collected 60 instances of data with kinematic features of motor disorders from neurological examination and demographic information of stroke patients with NIHSS 0 or 1 and MRC 7, 8, or 9 grades in a stroke unit. Training data with 240 instances were generated using a synthetic minority oversampling technique to complement the imbalanced number of data between classes and low number of training data. We trained 2 representative machine learning algorithms, an ensemble and a support vector machine (SVM), to implement auto-NIHSS and auto-MRC grading. The optimized algorithms performed a 5-fold cross-validation and were searched by Bayes optimization in 30 trials. The trained model was tested with the 60 original hold-out instances for performance evaluation in accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC). RESULTS: The proposed system can grade NIHSS scores with an accuracy of 83.3% and an AUC of 0.912 using an optimized ensemble algorithm, and it can grade with an accuracy of 80.0% and an AUC of 0.860 using an optimized SVM algorithm. The auto-MRC grading achieved an accuracy of 76.7% and a mean AUC of 0.870 in SVM classification and an accuracy of 78.3% and a mean AUC of 0.877 in ensemble classification. CONCLUSIONS: The automatic grading system quantifies proximal weakness in real time and assesses symptoms through automatic grading. The pilot outcomes demonstrated the feasibility of remote monitoring of motor weakness caused by stroke. The system can facilitate consistent grading with instant assessment and expedite dispatches to appropriate hospitals and treatment initiation by sharing auto-MRC and auto-NIHSS scores between prehospital and hospital responses as an objective observation.

Characteristics of Twitter Use by State Medicaid Programs in the United States: Machine Learning Approach.

BACKGROUND: Twitter is a potentially valuable tool for public health officials and state Medicaid programs in the United States, which provide public health insurance to 72 million Americans. OBJECTIVE: We aim to characterize how Medicaid agencies and managed care organization (MCO) health plans are using Twitter to communicate with the public. METHODS: Using Twitter's public application programming interface, we collected 158,714 public posts ("tweets") from active Twitter profiles of state Medicaid agencies and MCOs, spanning March 2014 through June 2019. Manual content analyses identified 5 broad categories of content, and these coded tweets were used to train supervised machine learning algorithms to classify all collected posts. RESULTS: We identified 15 state Medicaid agencies and 81 Medicaid MCOs on Twitter. The mean number of followers was 1784, the mean number of those followed was 542, and the mean number of posts was 2476. Approximately 39% of tweets came from just 10 accounts. Of all posts, 39.8% (63,168/158,714) were classified as general public health education and outreach; 23.5% (n=37,298) were about specific Medicaid policies, programs, services, or events; 18.4% (n=29,203) were organizational promotion of staff and activities; and 11.6% (n=18,411) contained general news and news links. Only 4.5% (n=7142) of posts were responses to specific questions, concerns, or complaints from the public. CONCLUSIONS: Twitter has the potential to enhance community building, beneficiary engagement, and public health outreach, but appears to be underutilized by the Medicaid program.

A Novel Approach for Continuous Health Status Monitoring and Automatic Detection of Infection Incidences in People With Type 1 Diabetes Using Machine Learning Algorithms (Part 2): A Personalized Digital Infectious Disease Detection Mechanism.

BACKGROUND: Semisupervised and unsupervised anomaly detection methods have been widely used in various applications to detect anomalous objects from a given data set. Specifically, these methods are popular in the medical domain because of their suitability for applications where there is a lack of a sufficient data set for the other classes. Infection incidence often brings prolonged hyperglycemia and frequent insulin injections in people with type 1 diabetes, which are significant anomalies. Despite these potentials, there have been very few studies that focused on detecting infection incidences in individuals with type 1 diabetes using a dedicated personalized health model. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop a personalized health model that can automatically detect the incidence of infection in people with type 1 diabetes using blood glucose levels and insulin-to-carbohydrate ratio as input variables. The model is expected to detect deviations from the norm because of infection incidences considering elevated blood glucose levels coupled with unusual changes in the insulin-to-carbohydrate ratio. METHODS: Three groups of one-class classifiers were trained on target data sets (regular days) and tested on a data set containing both the target and the nontarget (infection days). For comparison, two unsupervised models were also tested. The data set consists of high-precision self-recorded data collected from three real subjects with type 1 diabetes incorporating blood glucose, insulin, diet, and events of infection. The models were evaluated on two groups of data: raw and filtered data and compared based on their performance, computational time, and number of samples required. RESULTS: The one-class classifiers achieved excellent performance. In comparison, the unsupervised models suffered from performance degradation mainly because of the atypical nature of the data. Among the one-class classifiers, the boundary and domain-based method produced a better description of the data. Regarding the computational time, nearest neighbor, support vector data description, and self-organizing map took considerable training time, which typically increased as the sample size increased, and only local outlier factor and connectivity-based outlier factor took considerable testing time. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrated the applicability of one-class classifiers and unsupervised models for the detection of infection incidence in people with type 1 diabetes. In this patient group, detecting infection can provide an opportunity to devise tailored services and also to detect potential public health threats. The proposed approaches achieved excellent performance; in particular, the boundary and domain-based method performed better. Among the respective groups, particular models such as one-class support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor, and K-means achieved excellent performance in all the sample sizes and infection cases. Overall, we foresee that the results could encourage researchers to examine beyond the presented features into other additional features of the self-recorded data, for example, continuous glucose monitoring features and physical activity data, on a large scale.

Community Assessment of the Predictability of Cancer Protein and Phosphoprotein Levels from Genomics and Transcriptomics.

Cancer is driven by genomic alterations, but the processes causing this disease are largely performed by proteins. However, proteins are harder and more expensive to measure than genes and transcripts. To catalyze developments of methods to infer protein levels from other omics measurements, we leveraged crowdsourcing via the NCI-CPTAC DREAM proteogenomic challenge. We asked for methods to predict protein and phosphorylation levels from genomic and transcriptomic data in cancer patients. The best performance was achieved by an ensemble of models, including as predictors transcript level of the corresponding genes, interaction between genes, conservation across tumor types, and phosphosite proximity for phosphorylation prediction. Proteins from metabolic pathways and complexes were the best and worst predicted, respectively. The performance of even the best-performing model was modest, suggesting that many proteins are strongly regulated through translational control and degradation. Our results set a reference for the limitations of computational inference in proteogenomics. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the Supplemental Information.

The views of physicians and nurses on the potentials of an electronic assessment system for recognizing the needs of patients in palliative care.

OBJECTIVES: Patients in oncological and palliative care (PC) often have complex needs, which require a comprehensive treatment approach. The assessment of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) has been shown to improve identification of patient needs and foster adjustment of treatment. This study explores occupational routines, attitudes and expectations of physicians and nurses with regards to a planned electronic assessment system of PROs. METHODS: Ten physicians and nine nurses from various PC settings in Southern Germany were interviewed. The interviews were analysed with qualitative content analysis. RESULTS: The interviewees were sceptical about the quality of data generated through a patient self-assessment system. They criticised the rigidity of the electronic assessment questionnaire, which the interviewees noted may not fit the profile of all palliative patients. They feared the loss of personal contact between medical staff and patients and favoured in-person conversation and on-site observations on site over the potential system. Interviewees saw potential in being able to discover unseen needs from some patients. Interviewees evaluated the system positively in the case that the system served to broadly orient care plans without affecting or reducing the patient-caregiver relationship. CONCLUSIONS: A significant portion of the results touch upon the symbolic acceptance of the suggested system, which stands for an increasing standardisation and technisation of medicine where interpersonal contact and the professional expertise are marginalized. The study results can provide insight for processes and communication in the run-up to and during the implementation of electronic assessment systems.

Machine Learning Systems Applied to Health Data and System.

The use of machine learning (ML) in medicine is becoming increasingly fundamental to analyse complex problems by discovering associations among different types of information and to generate knowledge for medical decision support. Many regulatory and ethical issues should be considered. Some relevant EU provisions, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, are applicable. However, the regulatory framework for developing and marketing a new health technology implementing ML may be quite complex. Other issues include the legal liability and the attribution of negligence in case of errors. Some of the above-mentioned concerns could be, at least partially, resolved in case the ML software is classified as a 'medical device', a category covered by EU/national provisions. Concluding, the challenge is to understand how sustainable is the regulatory system in relation to the ML innovation and how legal procedures should be revised in order to adapt them to the current regulatory framework.