Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common and critical condition in intensive care unit (ICU) settings, characterized by rapid onset, high rates of underdiagnosis, and poor clinical outcomes. While existing early prediction models predominantly focus on AKI stage 1, the acute dialysis quality initiative (ADQI) emphasizes that early identification of advanced stages (2 and 3) is of greater clinical significance due to their increased severity and substantially higher mortality rates. In this study, we develop and validate a dynamic early prediction model for AKI stages 2 and 3 using multivariate time-series data extracted from the MIMIC-III database. To enhance the model's robustness, we perform comprehensive data preprocessing, including resampling to address temporal irregularities and multiple imputation to handle missing values. The sequence lengths are standardized through truncation, and the baseline feature differences between patient groups are analyzed. First, we evaluate several machine learning models, including logistic regression, for direct prediction within 96 hours after admission to the ICU, with CatBoost demonstrating the highest performance. Subsequently, we propose a four-layer bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) network for dynamic risk assessment, which leverages temporal dependencies in clinical data and significantly outperforms static prediction approaches. Furthermore, we incorporate an interpretability analysis to identify key predictive variables, thus supporting clinical decision-making and allowing timely interventions for high-risk patients. Our results demonstrate the potential of deep learning models to improve the early detection of severe AKI, with implications for optimizing ICU management strategies.
Citation: Hui Chang, Qiannan Hou, Yueli Chen. Time-series analysis of acute kidney injury based on machine learning[J]. Big Data and Information Analytics, 2025, 9: 302-327. doi: 10.3934/bdia.2025014
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common and critical condition in intensive care unit (ICU) settings, characterized by rapid onset, high rates of underdiagnosis, and poor clinical outcomes. While existing early prediction models predominantly focus on AKI stage 1, the acute dialysis quality initiative (ADQI) emphasizes that early identification of advanced stages (2 and 3) is of greater clinical significance due to their increased severity and substantially higher mortality rates. In this study, we develop and validate a dynamic early prediction model for AKI stages 2 and 3 using multivariate time-series data extracted from the MIMIC-III database. To enhance the model's robustness, we perform comprehensive data preprocessing, including resampling to address temporal irregularities and multiple imputation to handle missing values. The sequence lengths are standardized through truncation, and the baseline feature differences between patient groups are analyzed. First, we evaluate several machine learning models, including logistic regression, for direct prediction within 96 hours after admission to the ICU, with CatBoost demonstrating the highest performance. Subsequently, we propose a four-layer bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) network for dynamic risk assessment, which leverages temporal dependencies in clinical data and significantly outperforms static prediction approaches. Furthermore, we incorporate an interpretability analysis to identify key predictive variables, thus supporting clinical decision-making and allowing timely interventions for high-risk patients. Our results demonstrate the potential of deep learning models to improve the early detection of severe AKI, with implications for optimizing ICU management strategies.
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