Machine learning model for predicting the length of stay in the intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia

The COVID-19 virus has spread rapidally throughout the world. Managing resources is one of the biggest challenges that healthcare providers around the world face during the pandemic. Allocating the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds' capacity is important since COVID-19 is a respiratory disease and some patients need to be admitted to the hospital with an urgent need for oxygen support, ventilation, and/or intensive medical care. In the battle against COVID-19, many governments utilized technology, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), to contain the pandemic and limit its hazardous effects. In this paper, Machine Learning models (ML) were developed to help in detecting the COVID-19 patients’ need for the ICU and the estimated duration of their stay. Four ML algorithms were utilized: Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting (GB), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Ensemble models were trained and validated on a dataset of 895 COVID-19 patients admitted to King Fahad University hospital in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The conducted experiments show that the Length of Stay (LoS) in the ICU can be predicted with the highest accuracy by applying the RF model for prediction, as the achieved accuracy was 94.16%. In terms of the contributor factors to the length of stay in the ICU, correlation results showed that age, C-Reactive Protein (CRP), nasal oxygen support days are the top related factors. By searching the literature, there is no published work that used the Saudi Arabia dataset to predict the need for ICU with the number of days needed. This contribution is hoped to pave the path for hospitals and healthcare providers to manage their resources more efficiently and to help in saving lives.