Robust Meta-Model for Predicting the Likelihood of Receiving Blood Transfusion in Non-traumatic Intensive Care Unit Patients

Abstract

Background: Blood transfusions, crucial in managing anemia and coagulopathy in intensive care unit (ICU) settings, require accurate prediction for effective resource allocation and patient risk assessment. However, existing clinical decision support systems have primarily targeted a particular patient demographic with unique medical conditions and focused on a single type of blood transfusion. This study aims to develop an advanced machine learning-based model to predict the probability of transfusion necessity over the next 24 h for a diverse range of non-traumatic ICU patients. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study on 72,072 non-traumatic adult ICU patients admitted to a high-volume US metropolitan academic hospital between 2016 and 2020. We developed a meta-learner and various machine learning models to serve as predictors, training them annually with 4-year data and evaluating on the fifth, unseen year, iteratively over 5 years. Results: The experimental results revealed that the meta-model surpasses the other models in different development scenarios. It achieved notable performance metrics, including an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.97, an accuracy rate of 0.93, and an F1 score of 0.89 in the best scenario. Conclusion: This study pioneers the use of machine learning models for predicting the likelihood of blood transfusion receipt in a diverse cohort of critically ill patients. The findings of this evaluation confirm that our model not only effectively predicts transfusion reception but also identifies key biomarkers for making transfusion decisions.