Predicting presumed serious infection among hospitalized children on central venous lines with machine learning

Presumed serious infection (PSI) is defined as a blood culture drawn and new antibiotic course of at least 4 days among pediatric patients with Central Venous Lines (CVLs). Early PSI prediction and use of medical interventions can prevent adverse outcomes and improve the quality of care. Clinical features including demographics, laboratory results, vital signs, characteristics of the CVLs and medications used were extracted retrospectively from electronic medical records. Data were aggregated across all hospitals within a single pediatric health system and used to train machine learning models (XGBoost and ElasticNet) to predict the occurrence of PSI 8 h prior to clinical suspicion. Prediction for PSI was benchmarked against PRISM-III. Our model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.84 (95% CI = [0.82, 0.85]), sensitivity of 0.73 [0.69, 0.74], and positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.36 [0.34, 0.36]. The PRISM-III conversely achieved a lower sensitivity of 0.19 [0.16, 0.22] and PPV of 0.30 [0.26, 0.34] at a cut-off of ≥ 10. The features with the most impact on the PSI prediction were maximum diastolic blood pressure prior to PSI prediction (mean SHAP = 3.4), height (mean SHAP = 3.2), and maximum temperature prior to PSI prediction (mean SHAP = 2.6). A machine learning model using common features in the electronic medical records can predict the onset of serious infections in children with central venous lines at least 8 h prior to when a clinical team drew a blood culture. •A novel machine learning framework which predicts serious infections in children on CVL at least 8 hours prior to the onset.•The model outperformed PRISM-III which is the clinical criteria.•Explainable features were identified with SHAP values.