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Seeing the forest beyond the trees: Predicting survival in burn patients with machine learning. Am J Surg 2018 Mar;215(3):411-416

Date

11/12/2017

Pubmed ID

29126594

Pubmed Central ID

PMC5837911

DOI

10.1016/j.amjsurg.2017.10.027

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85032977530 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   17 Citations

Abstract

BACKGROUND: This study aims to identify predictors of survival for burn patients at the patient and hospital level using machine learning techniques.

METHODS: The HCUP SID for California, Florida and New York were used to identify patients admitted with a burn diagnosis and merged with hospital data from the AHA Annual Survey. Random forest and stochastic gradient boosting (SGB) were used to identify predictors of survival at the patient and hospital level from the top performing model.

RESULTS: We analyzed 31,350 patients from 670 hospitals. SGB (AUC 0.93) and random forest (AUC 0.82) best identified patient factors such as age and absence of renal failure (p < 0.001) and hospital factors such as full time residents (p < 0.001) and nurses (p = 0.004) to be associated with increased survival.

CONCLUSIONS: Patient and hospital factors are predictive of survival in burn patients. It is difficult to control patient factors, but hospital factors can inform decisions about where burn patients should be treated.

Author List

Cobb AN, Daungjaiboon W, Brownlee SA, Baldea AJ, Sanford AP, Mosier MM, Kuo PC

Author

Adrienne Cobb MD Assistant Professor in the Surgery department at Medical College of Wisconsin




MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Burns
Child
Child, Preschool
Clinical Decision-Making
Decision Support Techniques
Decision Trees
Female
Hospitals
Humans
Infant
Infant, Newborn
Machine Learning
Male
Middle Aged
Prognosis
United States
Young Adult