Development and Evaluation of an Automated Approach to Detect Weight Abnormalities in Pediatric Weight Charts

Inaccurate body weight measures can cause critical safety events in clinical settings as well as hindering utilization of clinical data for retrospective research. This study focused on developing a machine learning-based automated weight abnormality detector (AWAD) to analyze growth dynamics in pediatric weight charts and detect abnormal weight values. In two reference-standard based evaluation of real-world clinical data, the machine learning models showed good capacity for detecting weight abnormalities and they significantly outperformed the methods proposed in literature (p-value<0.05). A deep learning model with bi-directional long short-term memory networks achieved the best predictive performance, with AUCs ≥0.989 across the two datasets. The positive predictive value and sensitivity achieved by the system suggested more than 98% screening effort reduction potential in weight abnormality detection. Consequently, we hypothesize that the AWAD, when fully deployed, holds great potential to facilitate clinical research and healthcare delivery that rely on accurate and reliable weight measures.