Artificial Intelligence for the Prediction of In-Hospital Clinical Deterioration: A Systematic Review

To analyze the available literature on the performance of artificial intelligence-generated clinical models for the prediction of serious life-threatening events in non-ICU adult patients and evaluate their potential clinical usage.

The PubMed database was searched for relevant articles in English literature from January 1, 2000, to January 23, 2022. Search terms, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and deterioration, were both controlled terms and free-text terms.

We performed a systematic search reporting studies that showed performance of artificial intelligence-based models with outcome mortality and clinical deterioration.

Two review authors independently performed study selection and data extraction. Studies with the same outcome were grouped, namely mortality and various forms of deterioration (including ICU admission, adverse events, and cardiac arrests). Meta-analysis was planned in case sufficient data would be extracted from each study and no considerable heterogeneity between studies was present.

In total, 45 articles were included for analysis, in which multiple methods of artificial intelligence were used. Twenty-four articles described models for the prediction of mortality and 21 for clinical deterioration. Due to heterogeneity of study characteristics (patient cohort, outcomes, and prediction models), meta-analysis could not be performed. The main reported measure of performance was the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) (n = 38), of which 33 (87%) had an AUROC greater than 0.8. The highest reported performance in a model predicting mortality had an AUROC of 0.935 and an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.96.

Currently, a growing number of studies develop and analyzes artificial intelligence-based prediction models to predict critical illness and deterioration. We show that artificial intelligence-based prediction models have an overall good performance in predicting deterioration of patients. However, external validation of existing models and its performance in a clinical setting is highly recommended.