Early Prediction of Cardiac Arrest in the Intensive Care Unit Using Explainable Machine Learning: Retrospective Study

Background Cardiac arrest (CA) is one of the leading causes of death among patients in the intensive care unit (ICU). Although many CA prediction models with high sensitivity have been developed to anticipate CA, their practical application has been challenging due to a lack of generalization and validation. Additionally, the heterogeneity among patients in different ICU subtypes has not been adequately addressed. Objective This study aims to propose a clinically interpretable ensemble approach for the timely and accurate prediction of CA within 24 hours, regardless of patient heterogeneity, including variations across different populations and ICU subtypes. Additionally, we conducted patient-independent evaluations to emphasize the model’s generalization performance and analyzed interpretable results that can be readily adopted by clinicians in real-time. Methods Patients were retrospectively analyzed using data from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-IV (MIMIC-IV) and the eICU-Collaborative Research Database (eICU-CRD). To address the problem of underperformance, we constructed our framework using feature sets based on vital signs, multiresolution statistical analysis, and the Gini index, with a 12-hour window to capture the unique characteristics of CA. We extracted 3 types of features from each database to compare the performance of CA prediction between high-risk patient groups from MIMIC-IV and patients without CA from eICU-CRD. After feature extraction, we developed a tabular network (TabNet) model using feature screening with cost-sensitive learning. To assess real-time CA prediction performance, we used 10-fold leave-one-patient-out cross-validation and a cross–data set method. We evaluated MIMIC-IV and eICU-CRD across different cohort populations and subtypes of ICU within each database. Finally, external validation using the eICU-CRD and MIMIC-IV databases was conducted to assess the model’s generalization ability. The decision mask of the proposed method was used to capture the interpretability of the model. Results The proposed method outperformed conventional approaches across different cohort populations in both MIMIC-IV and eICU-CRD. Additionally, it achieved higher accuracy than baseline models for various ICU subtypes within both databases. The interpretable prediction results can enhance clinicians’ understanding of CA prediction by serving as a statistical comparison between non-CA and CA groups. Next, we tested the eICU-CRD and MIMIC-IV data sets using models trained on MIMIC-IV and eICU-CRD, respectively, to evaluate generalization ability. The results demonstrated superior performance compared with baseline models. Conclusions Our novel framework for learning unique features provides stable predictive power across different ICU environments. Most of the interpretable global information reveals statistical differences between CA and non-CA groups, demonstrating its utility as an indicator for clinical decisions. Consequently, the proposed CA prediction system is a clinically validated algorithm that enables clinicians to intervene early based on CA prediction information and can be applied to clinical trials in digital health.