Abstract
BACKGROUND: The use of machine learning techniques to predict diseases outcomes has grown significantly in the last decade. Several studies prove that the machine learning predictive techniques outperform the classical multivariate techniques. We aimed to build a machine learning predictive model to predict the in-hospital mortality for patients who sustained Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). METHODS: Adult patients with TBI who were hospitalized in the level 1 trauma center in the period from January 2014 to February 2019 were included in this study. Patients' demographics, injury characteristics and CT findings were used as predictors. The predictive performance of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) was evaluated in terms of accuracy, Area Under the Curve (AUC), sensitivity, precision, Negative Predictive Value (NPV), specificity and F-score. RESULTS: A total of 1620 eligible patients were included in the study (1417 survival and 203 non-survivals). Both models achieved accuracy over 91% and AUC over 93%. SVM achieved the optimal performance with accuracy 95.6% and AUC 96%. CONCLUSIONS: for prediction of mortality in patients with TBI, SVM outperformed the well-known classical models that utilized the conventional multivariate analytical techniques.