Machine Learning Models for Predicting In-Hospital Mortality in Acute Aortic Dissection Patients

Background: Acute aortic dissection is a potentially fatal cardiovascular disorder associated with high mortality. However, current predictive models show a limited ability to efficiently and flexibly detect this mortality risk, and have been unable to discover a relationship between the mortality rate and certain variables. Thus, this study takes an artificial intelligence approach, whereby clinical data-driven machine learning was utilized to predict the in-hospital mortality of acute aortic dissection. Methods: Patients diagnosed with acute aortic dissection between January 2015 to December 2018 were voluntarily enrolled from the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University in the study. The diagnosis was defined by magnetic resonance angiography or computed tomography angiography, with an onset time of the symptoms being within 14 days. The analytical variables included demographic characteristics, physical examination, symptoms, clinical condition, laboratory results, and treatment strategies. The machine learning algorithms included logistic regression, decision tree, K nearest neighbor, Gaussian naive bayes, and extreme gradient boost (XGBoost). Evaluation of the predictive performance of the models was mainly achieved using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. SHapley Additive exPlanation was also implemented to interpret the final prediction model. Results: A total of 1,344 acute aortic dissection patients were recruited, including 1,071 (79.7%) patients in the survivor group and 273 (20.3%) patients in non-survivor group. The extreme gradient boost model was found to be the most effective model with the greatest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (0.927, 95% CI: 0.860–0.968). The three most significant aspects of the extreme gradient boost importance matrix plot were treatment, type of acute aortic dissection, and ischemia-modified albumin levels. In the SHapley Additive exPlanation summary plot, medical treatment, type A acute aortic dissection, and higher ischemia-modified albumin level were shown to increase the risk of hospital-based mortality.