Comparison of different AI systems for diagnosing sepsis, septic shock, and cardiogenic shock: a retrospective study

Sepsis, septic shock, and cardiogenic shock are life-threatening conditions associated with high mortality rates, but differentiating them is complex because they share certain symptoms. Using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)-III database and artificial intelligence (AI), we aimed to increase diagnostic precision, focusing on Bayesian network classifiers (BNCs) and comparing them with other AI methods. Data from 5970 adults, including 950 patients with cardiogenic shock, 1946 patients with septic shock, and 3074 patients with sepsis, were extracted for this study. Of the original 51 variables included in the data records, 12 were selected for constructing the predictive model. The data were divided into training and validation sets at an 80:20 ratio, and the performance of the BNCs was evaluated and compared with that of other AI models, such as the one rule classifier (OneR), classification and regression tree (CART), and an artificial neural network (ANN), in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F1-score. The BNCs exhibited an accuracy of 87.6% to 91.5%. The CART model demonstrated a notable 91.6% accuracy when only three decision levels were used, whereas the intricate ANN model reached 90.5% accuracy. Both the BNCs and the CART model allowed clear interpretation of the predictions. BNCs have the potential to be valuable tools in diagnostic tasks, with an accuracy, sensitivity, and precision comparable, in some cases, to those of ANNs while demonstrating superior interpretability.