Accurate and reproducible prediction of ICU readmissions

Abstract

Readmission in the intensive care unit (ICU) is associated with poor clinical outcomes and high costs. Traditional scoring methods to help clinicians deciding whether a patient is ready for discharge have failed to meet expectations, paving the way for machine learning based approaches. Freely available datasets such as MIMIC-III have served as benchmarking media to compare such tools. We used the OMOP-CDM version of MIMIC-III (MIMIC-OMOP) to train and evaluate a lightweight tree boosting method to predict readmission in ICU at different time points after discharge (3, 7, 15 and 30 days), outperforming existing solutions with an AUROC of 0.802 (SD=0.011) and a recall of 0.837 (SD=0.016) for 3-days readmission.