Explainable Artificial Intelligence Approach for the Early Prediction of Ventilator Support and Mortality in COVID-19 Patients

Abstract

Early prediction of mortality and risk of deterioration in COVID-19 patients can reduce mortality and increase the opportunity for better and more timely treatment. In the current study, the DL model and explainable artificial intelligence (EAI) were combined to identify the impact of certain attributes on the prediction of mortality and ventilatory support in COVID-19 patients. Nevertheless, the DL model does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality, but in order to identify significant attributes, the EAI feature importance method was used. The DL model produced significant results; however, it lacks interpretability. The study was performed using COVID-19-hospitalized patients in King Abdulaziz Medical City, Riyadh. The dataset contains the patients’ demographic information, laboratory investigations, and chest X-ray (CXR) findings. The dataset used suffers from an imbalance; therefore, balanced accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, Youden index, and AUC measures were used to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Furthermore, the experiments were conducted using original and SMOTE (over and under sampled) datasets. The proposed model outperforms the baseline study, with a balanced accuracy of 0.98 and an AUC of 0.998 for predicting mortality using the full-feature set. Meanwhile, for predicting ventilator support a highest balanced accuracy of 0.979 and an AUC of 0.981 was achieved. The proposed explainable prediction model will assist doctors in the early prediction of COVID-19 patients that are at risk of mortality or ventilatory support and improve the management of hospital resources.