Background: Critically ill patients frequently experience multi-organ dysfunction and unstable vital signs, increasing their risk of myocardial injury and elevated serum troponin levels. Myocardial injury from oxygen supply-demand mismatch, whether due to systemic disease or obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD), often leads to patients undergoing an invasive coronary angiogram (ICA) and potentially percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) if obstructive CAD is identified. However, this procedure carries significant risks for critically ill patients. To address this challenge, we aimed to develop a machine learning (ML) model to predict the need for PCI in critically ill patients with myocardial injury. Methods: The study cohort included critically ill patients with elevated serum troponin levels who underwent ICA during their hospitalization at a single institution from 2012 to 2022. We defined critical illness as a life-threatening condition requiring intensive support for vital sign instability. Patients with atherothrombosis identified during ICA were excluded from the study, focusing only on patients with type 2 MI. We utilized Matplotlib to analyze patient data, including demographics, lab results, vital signs, and comorbidities. We then used XGBoost, a supervised ML algorithm, for binary classification tasks. An ensemble of decision trees was employed, with gradient boosting to correct errors from previous trees. XGBoost iteratively adjusted predictions, creating a model to predict which patients required PCI. Results: Out of 765 patients, 173 (22.6%) underwent PCI. The cohort had a mean age of 60.5 ± 13.5 years, with 41.7% being female. The ML model accurately identified non-PCI candidates at 75% and PCI candidates at 64%, achieving an overall accuracy of 73%. The three most important features identified by the model were a history of diabetes, diastolic heart failure, and whether the patient received a blood transfusion during hospitalization. Conclusion: A ML approach using XGBoost demonstrated moderate accuracy in predicting the need for PCI in critically ill patients with signs of myocardial injury. This prediction holds clinical significance due to the heightened risks associated with ICA in these patients. Given that PCI occurred in only 22.6% of the cohort, future models should include a higher proportion of patients who underwent PCI to improve the robustness and true positive accuracy of the model.
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