Open AccessUsing Unsupervised Machine Learning to Identify Age- and Sex-Independent Severity Subgroups Among Patients with COVID-19: Observational Longitudinal Study
Author(s) -
Julián BenitoLeón,
M. Dolores del Castillo,
Alberto Estirado,
Ritwik Ghosh,
Souvik Dubey,
J. Ignacio Serrano
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
jmir. journal of medical internet research/journal of medical internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.446
H-Index - 142
eISSN - 1439-4456
pISSN - 1438-8871
DOI - 10.2196/25988
Subject(s) - observational study , triage , alanine transaminase , lactate dehydrogenase , aspartate transaminase , covid-19 , medicine , cluster (spacecraft) , alanine aminotransferase , biology , emergency medicine , disease , enzyme , biochemistry , alkaline phosphatase , computer science , infectious disease (medical specialty) , programming language
Background Early detection and intervention are the key factors for improving outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective The objective of this observational longitudinal study was to identify nonoverlapping severity subgroups (ie, clusters) among patients with COVID-19, based exclusively on clinical data and standard laboratory tests obtained during patient assessment in the emergency department. Methods We applied unsupervised machine learning to a data set of 853 patients with COVID-19 from the HM group of hospitals (HM Hospitales) in Madrid, Spain. Age and sex were not considered while building the clusters, as these variables could introduce biases in machine learning algorithms and raise ethical implications or enable discrimination in triage protocols. Results From 850 clinical and laboratory variables, four tests—the serum levels of aspartate transaminase (AST), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), C-reactive protein (CRP), and the number of neutrophils—were enough to segregate the entire patient pool into three separate clusters. Further, the percentage of monocytes and lymphocytes and the levels of alanine transaminase (ALT) distinguished cluster 3 patients from the other two clusters. The highest proportion of deceased patients; the highest levels of AST, ALT, LDH, and CRP; the highest number of neutrophils; and the lowest percentages of monocytes and lymphocytes characterized cluster 1. Cluster 2 included a lower proportion of deceased patients and intermediate levels of the previous laboratory tests. The lowest proportion of deceased patients; the lowest levels of AST, ALT, LDH, and CRP; the lowest number of neutrophils; and the highest percentages of monocytes and lymphocytes characterized cluster 3. Conclusions A few standard laboratory tests, deemed available in all emergency departments, have shown good discriminative power for the characterization of severity subgroups among patients with COVID-19.