Abstract
Cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of death worldwide. The aim of the present study is to verify the performances of a data mining methodology in the evaluation of cardiovascular risk in athletes, and whether the results may be used to support clinical decision making. Anthropometric (height and weight), demographic (age and sex) and biomedical (blood pressure and pulse rate) data of 26,002 athletes were collected in 2012 during routine sport medical examinations, which included electrocardiography at rest. Subjects were involved in competitive sport practice, for which medical clearance was needed. Outcomes were negative for the largest majority, as expected in an active population. Resampling was applied to balance positive/negative class ratio. A decision tree and logistic regression were used to classify individuals as either at risk or not. The receiver operating characteristic curve was used to assess classification performances. Data mining and resampling improved cardiovascular risk assessment in terms of increased area under the curve. The proposed methodology can be effectively applied to biomedical data in order to optimize clinical decision making, and—at the same time—minimize the amount of unnecessary examinations.
Highlights
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are reportedly the major cause of death worldwide, taking an estimated 17.9 million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization [1]
This is true in the assessment of cardiovascular risk, since pulse rate and blood pressure have upper and lower thresholds
Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) improved the performances of decision tree (DT) in terms of greater area under the ROC curve (AUC) and sensitivity
Summary
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are reportedly the major cause of death worldwide, taking an estimated 17.9 million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization [1]. Obesity, smoking, physical inactivity and high blood pressure are among the most important risk factors [2]. Even if they may be mitigated by consistent sport practice [3,4], CVDs can still be considered an actual danger for individuals engaged in competitions or strenuous training [5,6,7,8] because of intense and repeated efforts. According to the outcome of the ECG examination, individuals are diagnosed as either at risk (positive, P) or not (negative, N). Subjects at risk are denied medical clearance for sport practice
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