Artificial neural networks improve and simplify intensive care mortality prognostication: a national cohort study of 217,289 first-time intensive care unit admissions

PURPOSE: We investigated if early intensive care unit (ICU) scoring with the Simplified Acute Physiology Score (SAPS 3) could be improved using artificial neural networks (ANNs). METHODS: All first-time adult intensive care admissions in Sweden during 2009–2017 were included. A test set was set aside for validation. We trained ANNs with two hidden layers with random hyper-parameters and retained the best ANN, determined using cross-validation. The ANNs were constructed using the same parameters as in the SAPS 3 model. The performance was assessed with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and Brier score. RESULTS: A total of 217,289 admissions were included. The developed ANN (AUC 0.89 and Brier score 0.096) was found to be superior (p <10(−15) for AUC and p <10(−5) for Brier score) in early prediction of 30-day mortality for intensive care patients when compared with SAPS 3 (AUC 0.85 and Brier score 0.109). In addition, a simple, eight-parameter ANN model was found to perform just as well as SAPS 3, but with better calibration (AUC 0.85 and and Brier score 0.106, p <10(−5)). Furthermore, the ANN model was superior in correcting mortality for age. CONCLUSION: ANNs can outperform the SAPS 3 model for early prediction of 30-day mortality for intensive care patients.