Prediction of acute organophosphate poisoning severity using machine learning techniques

Poisoning with organophosphate compounds is a significant public health risk, especially in developing countries. Considering the importance of early and accurate prediction of organophosphate poisoning prognosis, the aim of this study was to develop a machine learning-based prediction model to predict the severity of organophosphate poisoning. The data of patients with organophosphate poisoning were retrospectively extracted and split into training and test sets in a ratio of 70:30. The feature selection was done by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator method. Selected features were fed into five machine learning techniques, including Histogram Boosting Gradient, eXtreme Gradient Boosting, K-Nearest Neighborhood, Support Vector Machine (SVM) (kernel = linear), and Random Forest. The Scikit-learn library in Python programming language was used to implement the models. Finally, the performance of developed models was measured using ten-fold cross-validation methods and some evaluation criteria with 95 % confidence intervals. A total of 1237 patients were used to train and test the machine learning models. According to the criteria determining severe organophosphate poisoning, 732 patients were assigned to group 1 (patients with mild to moderate poisoning) and 505 patients were assigned to group 2 (patients with severe poisoning). With an AUC value of 0.907 (95 % CI 0.89–0.92), the model developed using XGBoost outperformed other models. Feature importance evaluation found that venous blood gas-pH, white blood cells, and plasma cholinesterase activity were the top three variables that contribute the most to the prediction performance of the prognosis in patients with organophosphate poisoning. XGBoost model yield an accuracy of 90.1 % (95 % CI 0.891–0.918), specificity of 91.4 % (95 % CI 0.90–0.92), a sensitivity of 89.5 % (95 % CI 0.87–0.91), F-measure of 91.2 % (95 % CI 0.90–0.921), and Kappa statistic of 91.2 % (95 % CI 0.90–0.92). The machine learning-based prediction models can accurately predict the severity of organophosphate poisoning. Based on feature selection techniques, the most important predictors of organophosphate poisoning were VBG-pH, white blood cell count, plasma cholinesterase activity, VBG-BE, and age. The best algorithm with the highest predictive performance was the XGBoost classifier.