Risk prediction of inappropriate implantable cardioverter-defibrillator therapy using machine learning

We aimed to develop machine learning-based predictive models for identifying inappropriate implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) therapy. Our study included 182 consecutive cases (average age 62.2 ± 4.5 years, 169 men) and employed 14 non-deep learning models for prediction (hold-out method). These models utilized selected electrocardiogram parameters and clinical features collected after ICD implantation. From the feature importance analysis of the best ML model, we established easily calculable scores. Among the patients, 25 (13.7%) experienced inappropriate therapy, and we identified 16 significant predictors. Using recursive feature elimination with cross-validation, we reduced the features to six with high feature importance: history of atrial arrhythmia (Atr-arrhythm), ischemic cardiomyopathy (ICM), absence of diabetes mellitus (DM), lack of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), V3 ST level at J point (V3 STJ), and V5 R-wave amplitudes (V5R amp). The extra-trees classifier yielded the highest area under receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC; 0.869 on test data). Thus, the Cardi35 score was defined as [+ 5.5*Atr-arrhythm − 1.5*CRT + 1.0*V3STJ + 1.0*V5R − 1.0*ICM − 0.5*DM], which demonstrated a hazard ratio of 1.62 (P < 0.001). A cut-off value of the score + 5.5 showed high AUROC (0.826). The ML approach can yield a robust prediction model, and the Cardi35 score was a convenient predictor for inappropriate therapy.