Machine Learning Predicts Acute Kidney Injury in Hospitalized Patients with Sickle Cell Disease

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is common among hospitalized patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) and contributes to increased morbidity and mortality. Early identification and management of AKI is essential to preventing poor outcomes. We aimed to predict AKI earlier in patients with SCD using a machine-learning model that utilized continuous minute-by-minute physiological data.

A total of6,278 adult SCD patient encounters were admitted to inpatient units across five regional hospitals in Memphis, TN, over 3 years, from July 2017 to December 2020. From these, 1,178 patients were selected after filtering for data availability. AKI was identified in 82 (7%) patient encounters, using the 2012 Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) criteria. The remaining 1,096 encounters served as controls. Features derived from five physiological data streams, heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure (systolic, diastolic, and mean), captured every minute from bedside monitors were used. An XGBoost classifier was used for classification.

Our model accurately predicted AKI up to 12 h before onset with an area under the receiver operator curve (AUROC) of 0.91 (95% CI [0.89-0.93]) and up to 48 h before AKI with an AUROC of 0.82 (95% CI [0.80-0.83]). Patients with AKI were more likely to be female (64.6%) and have history of hypertension, pulmonary hypertension, chronic kidney disease, and pneumonia than the control group.

XGBoost accurately predicted AKI as early as 12 h before onset in hospitalized SCD patients and may enable the development of innovative prevention strategies.