Abstract
BACKGROUND: The pandemic emergent disease multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) following coronavirus disease-19 infection can mimic endemic typhus. We aimed to use artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a clinical decision support system that accurately distinguishes MIS-C versus endemic typhus (MET). METHODS: Demographic, clinical, and laboratory features rapidly available following presentation were extracted for 133 patients with MIS-C and 87 patients hospitalized due to typhus. An attention module assigned importance to inputs used to create the 2-phase AI-MET. Phase 1 uses 17 features to arrive at a classification manually (MET-17). If the confidence level is not surpassed, 13 additional features are added to calculate MET-30 using a recurrent neural network. RESULTS: While 24 of 30 features differed statistically, the values overlapped sufficiently that the features were clinically irrelevant distinguishers as individual parameters. However, AI-MET successfully classified typhus and MIS-C with 100% accuracy. A validation cohort of 111 additional patients with MIS-C was classified with 99% accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: Artificial intelligence can successfully distinguish MIS-C from typhus using rapidly available features. This decision support system will be a valuable tool for front-line providers facing the difficulty of diagnosing a febrile child in endemic areas.