Fatty Chain Acids Risk Factors in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: A Genetic Algorithm Approach

Abstract

Medicine and artificial intelligence (AI) have made great progress, since they have achieved unprecedented knowledge and explanations about how the human body works and about some diseases that seemed to have no way of preventing, diagnosing or treating or simply help make those processes more efficient. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) could benefit from AI, since to date it has not been possible to clarify what actually causes it, devices to monitor vital signs have been used so far, an recently was made a predictive model to predict results from an autopsy in infants, however, further investigation is necessary to more effectively prevent. The main objective of this work is to be able to find a set of factors related to short chain fatty acids (SCFA) that could help to understand the risk of SIDS. Was used a public dataset named “Analysis of SCFA profile in infants dying of SIDS compared to infants dying of controls”, that contained SCFA values, of deceased children, labels them as SIDS death and from another cause (control). For pre-processing some variables were removed from the dataset. An analysis was performed with a feature ranking with genetic algorithm (GA) and risk analysis using the information of SCFAs and their relationship with SIDS, is presented. The median was calculated for each of the SFCA, which served to form two groups necessary to evaluate the risk difference and the risk relationship depending on the amount of acids present for each subject. As results, Octanoic acid represents a risk difference of 18% for the population with an amount less than 3.5 uM and an individual risk of 1.28 times. On the other hand, hexanoic and propinoic acids present a risk difference of less than 11% with a lesser amount of 23 and 128 uM respectively, as well as an individual risk of approximately 0.85 times. As conclusion there is 18% higher risk of developing SIDS if octanoic acid is less than 3.5 uM or 1.28 times greater risk. On the other hand, with hexanoic and propionic acid, they agree that there is an 11% lower risk of developing SIDS (of manner independent), if the values are less than 23 uM and 128 uM, respectively.