Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients

Biomedical research is increasingly employing real world evidence (RWE) to foster discoveries of novel clinical phenotypes and to better characterize long term effect of medical treatments. However, due to limitations inherent in the collection process, RWE often lacks key features of patients, part...

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Main Authors: Jamie Wallis, Andres Azqueta-Gavaldon, Thanusha Ananthakumar, Robert Dürichen, Luca Albergante
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2022-01-01
Series:Informatics in Medicine Unlocked
Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352914822001770
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author Jamie Wallis
Andres Azqueta-Gavaldon
Thanusha Ananthakumar
Robert Dürichen
Luca Albergante
author_facet Jamie Wallis
Andres Azqueta-Gavaldon
Thanusha Ananthakumar
Robert Dürichen
Luca Albergante
author_sort Jamie Wallis
collection DOAJ
description Biomedical research is increasingly employing real world evidence (RWE) to foster discoveries of novel clinical phenotypes and to better characterize long term effect of medical treatments. However, due to limitations inherent in the collection process, RWE often lacks key features of patients, particularly when these features cannot be directly encoded using data standards such as ICD-10. Here, we propose a novel data-driven statistical machine learning approach, named Feature Imputation via Local Likelihood (FILL), designed to infer missing features by exploiting feature similarity between patients. We test our method using a particularly challenging problem: differentiating heart failure patients with reduced versus preserved ejection fraction (HFrEF and HFpEF respectively). The complexity of the task stems from three aspects: the two share many common characteristics and treatments, only part of the relevant diagnoses may have been recorded, and the information on ejection fraction is often missing from RWE datasets. Despite these difficulties, our method is shown to be capable of inferring heart failure patients with HFpEF with a precision above 80% when considering multiple scenarios across two RWE datasets containing 11,950 and 10,051 heart failure patients. This is an improvement when compared to classical approaches such as logistic regression and random forest which were only able to achieve a precision < 73%. Finally, this approach allows us to analyse which features are commonly associated with HFpEF patients. For example, we found that specific diagnostic codes for atrial fibrillation and personal history of long-term use of anticoagulants are often key in identifying HFpEF patients.
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spelling doaj.art-9e0a2467ee4c4ecebc5dc5c433e3505b2022-12-22T03:46:39ZengElsevierInformatics in Medicine Unlocked2352-91482022-01-0132101035Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patientsJamie Wallis0Andres Azqueta-Gavaldon1Thanusha Ananthakumar2Robert Dürichen3Luca Albergante4Corresponding author.; Sensyne Health Plc, Oxford, UKSensyne Health Plc, Oxford, UKSensyne Health Plc, Oxford, UKSensyne Health Plc, Oxford, UKSensyne Health Plc, Oxford, UKBiomedical research is increasingly employing real world evidence (RWE) to foster discoveries of novel clinical phenotypes and to better characterize long term effect of medical treatments. However, due to limitations inherent in the collection process, RWE often lacks key features of patients, particularly when these features cannot be directly encoded using data standards such as ICD-10. Here, we propose a novel data-driven statistical machine learning approach, named Feature Imputation via Local Likelihood (FILL), designed to infer missing features by exploiting feature similarity between patients. We test our method using a particularly challenging problem: differentiating heart failure patients with reduced versus preserved ejection fraction (HFrEF and HFpEF respectively). The complexity of the task stems from three aspects: the two share many common characteristics and treatments, only part of the relevant diagnoses may have been recorded, and the information on ejection fraction is often missing from RWE datasets. Despite these difficulties, our method is shown to be capable of inferring heart failure patients with HFpEF with a precision above 80% when considering multiple scenarios across two RWE datasets containing 11,950 and 10,051 heart failure patients. This is an improvement when compared to classical approaches such as logistic regression and random forest which were only able to achieve a precision < 73%. Finally, this approach allows us to analyse which features are commonly associated with HFpEF patients. For example, we found that specific diagnostic codes for atrial fibrillation and personal history of long-term use of anticoagulants are often key in identifying HFpEF patients.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352914822001770
spellingShingle Jamie Wallis
Andres Azqueta-Gavaldon
Thanusha Ananthakumar
Robert Dürichen
Luca Albergante
Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients
Informatics in Medicine Unlocked
title Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients
title_full Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients
title_fullStr Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients
title_full_unstemmed Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients
title_short Similarity-based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients
title_sort similarity based prediction of ejection fraction in heart failure patients
url http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352914822001770
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