Multi-Clinical Factors Combined with an Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Diagnosis Model for HIV-Infected People with Bloodstream Infection

PURPOSE: Although highly active antiretroviral therapy (HA-ART) can effectively suppress the disease process in patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), opportunistic infections, mainly bloodstream infections (BSI), are still the main cause of death in people living with HIV. There is no effective diagnostic strategy for HIV-infected people with BSI. This study aimed to develop an AI diagnostic model with high sensitivity to improve the early detection of HIV-infected people with BSI. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This study retrospectively analyzed the 40 clinical factors of 498 HIV-infected people (171 with BSI positive and 327 with BSI negative) who admitted to Wenzhou Central Hospital from September 2014 to July 2021. This study used the hospital information management system to collect the clinical characteristics, laboratory and imaging examination results, and clinical diagnosis of the two groups. The diagnostic results of all patients were in line with the diagnostic criteria of the Chinese Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Treatment of AIDS (2021 Edition), and the BSI diagnosis was in line with the diagnostic criteria of sepsis and bacteremia in Practical Internal Medicine (13th Edition). On this basis, various risk prediction models were established by combining 8 artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in the training set and validating the diagnosis performance in the testing set. The model with the best diagnostic performance was selected as the final diagnostic model. RESULTS: The clinical characteristics of HIV-infected people with BSI are atypical, and the pathogens in this area are mainly fungi. Ten risk factors were selected: low level of hemoglobin, CD4+T cell and platelets, high level of lactate dehydrogenase and blood urea nitrogen, splenomegaly, without ART treatment, strip shadow, nodular shadow, and shock. The combination of the ten risk factors, age, gender and the “svmRadial” model can identify the HIV-infected people with BSI from the HIV-infected people without BSI with an area under the curve of 0.916 and a sensitivity and specificity of 0.824 and 0.855, respectively. CONCLUSION: The model showed excellent performance in diagnosing HIV-infected people with BSI. Internal and external validation showed that the diagnosis model had high clinical application value.