A Deep Learning Approach for the Estimation of Glomerular Filtration Rate

An accurate estimation of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is clinically crucial for kidney disease diagnosis and predicting the prognosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Machine learning methodologies such as deep neural networks provide a potential avenue for increasing accuracy in GFR estimation. We developed a novel deep learning architecture, a deep and shallow neural network, to estimate GFR (dlGFR for short) and examined its comparative performance with estimated GFR from Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) and Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) equations. The dlGFR model jointly trains a shallow learning model and a deep neural network to enable both linear transformation from input features to a log GFR target, and non-linear feature embedding for stage of kidney function classification. We validate the proposed methods on the data from multiple studies obtained from the NIDDK Central Database Repository. The deep learning model predicted values of GFR within 30% of measured GFR with 88.3% accuracy, compared to the 87.1% and 84.7% of the accuracy achieved by CKD-EPI and MDRD equations (p = 0.051 and p < 0.001, respectively). Our results suggest that deep learning methods are superior to equations resulting from traditional statistical methods in estimating glomerular filtration rate. Based on these results, an end-to-end predication system has been deployed to facilitate use of the proposed dlGFR algorithm.