Predictive modeling for acute kidney injury after percutaneous coronary intervention in patients with acute coronary syndrome: a machine learning approach

Abstract

Background Acute kidney injury (AKI) is one of the preventable complications of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). This study aimed to develop machine learning (ML) models to predict AKI after PCI in patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Methods This study was conducted at Tehran Heart Center from 2015 to 2020. Several variables were used to design five ML models: Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR), CatBoost (CB), Multi-layer Perception (MLP), and Random Forest (RF). Feature importance was evaluated with the RF model, CB model, and LR coefficients while SHAP beeswarm plots based on the CB model were also used for deriving the importance of variables in the population using pre-procedural variables and all variables. Sensitivity, specificity, and the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (ROC-AUC) were used as the evaluation measures. Results A total of 4592 patients were included, and 646 (14.1%) experienced AKI. The train data consisted of 3672 and the test data included 920 cases. The patient population had a mean age of 65.6 ± 11.2 years and 73.1% male predominance. Notably, left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) and fasting plasma glucose (FPG) had the highest feature importance when training the RF model on only pre-procedural features. SHAP plots for all features demonstrated LVEF and age as the top features. With pre-procedural variables only, CB had the highest AUC for the prediction of AKI (AUC 0.755, 95% CI 0.713 to 0.797), while RF had the highest sensitivity (75.9%) and MLP had the highest specificity (64.35%). However, when considering pre-procedural, procedural, and post-procedural features, RF outperformed other models (AUC: 0.775). In this analysis, CB achieved the highest sensitivity (82.95%) and NB had the highest specificity (82.93%). Conclusion Our analyses showed that ML models can predict AKI with acceptable performance. This has potential clinical utility for assessing the individualized risk of AKI in ACS patients undergoing PCI. Additionally, the identified features in the models may aid in mitigating these risk factors. Graphical Abstract