Using Machine Learning Algorithms to Predict Risk for Development of Calciphylaxis in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease

Calciphylaxis is a disorder that results in necrotic cutaneous lesions with a high rate of mortality. Due to its rarity and complexity, the risk factors for and the disease mechanism of calciphylaxis are not fully understood. This work focuses on the use of machine learning to both predict disease risk and model the contributing factors learned from an electronic health record data set. We present the results of four modeling approaches on several subpopulations of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). We find that modeling calciphylaxis risk with random forests learned from binary feature data produces strong models, and in the case of predicting calciphylaxis development among stage 4 CKD patients, we achieve an AUC-ROC of 0.8718. This ability to successfully predict calciphylaxis may provide an excellent opportunity for clinical translation of the predictive models presented in this paper.