Patient-Specific Predictive Antibiogram in Decision Support for Empiric Antibiotic Treatment

Abstract

Background: The rising trend of antibiotic resistance imposes a heavy burden on healthcare both clinically and economically (US$55 billion), with 23,000 estimated annual deaths in the United States as well as increased length of stay and morbidity. Machine-learning–based methods have, of late, been used for leveraging patient’s clinical history and demographic information to predict antimicrobial resistance. We developed a machine-learning model ensemble that maximizes the accuracy of such a drug-sensitivity versus resistivity classification system compared to the existing best-practice methods. Methods: We first performed a comprehensive analysis of the association between infecting bacterial species and patient factors, including patient demographics, comorbidities, and certain healthcare-specific features. We leveraged the predictable nature of these complex associations to infer patient-specific antibiotic sensitivities. Various base-learners, including k-NN (k-nearest neighbors) and gradient boosting machine (GBM), were used to train an ensemble model for confident prediction of antimicrobial susceptibilities. Base learner selection and model performance evaluation was performed carefully using a variety of standard metrics, namely accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and Cohen κ. Results: For validating the performance on MIMIC-III database harboring deidentified clinical data of 53,423 distinct patient admissions between 2001 and 2012, in the intensive care units (ICUs) of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. From ~11,000 positive cultures, we used 4 major specimen types namely urine, sputum, blood, and pus swab for evaluation of the model performance. Figure 1 shows the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves obtained for bloodstream infection cases upon model building and prediction on 70:30 split of the data. We received area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.88, 0.92, 0.92, and 0.94 for urine, sputum, blood, and pus swab samples, respectively. Figure 2 shows the comparative performance of our proposed method as well as some off-the-shelf classification algorithms. Conclusions: Highly accurate, patient-specific predictive antibiogram (PSPA) data can aid clinicians significantly in antibiotic recommendation in ICU, thereby accelerating patient recovery and curbing antimicrobial resistance.

Funding: This study was supported by Circle of Life Healthcare Pvt. Ltd.

Disclosures: None